Commentary
#355 | A Financial Strength Gut Check
Quick Take Life insurer financial strength is arguably made up of three primary components - operations, assets and liabilities. The first two are well-handled by traditional resources such as financial strength ratings, but implicit in those ratings is the assumption…
#354 | SVB, Liquidity & Life Insurance
Quick Take The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has shaken confidence in the financial system and raised questions about whether life insurers could find themselves in a similar situation. At first blush, the data is not comforting. SVB's unrealized capital…
AG 49-B Article – Aspire Magazine
I wrote this article for Aspire Magazine, but I thought I would reprint it here on The Life Product Review because it’s a concise description of the history of Indexed UL illustration regulation and the forthcoming revisions to AG 49-A,…
#351 | Rising Rates & Policy Loans
Quick Take One of the most obvious and profound impact of rising interest rates has been on variable policy loan interest rates that are pegged to the Moody's Composite both in participating loans in Indexed UL and in non-direct recognition…
#348 | The Next Front in the IUL Illustration War?
Quick Take In each round of the past Indexed UL regulation, the seeds of the next round were already in the ground before the final language was even adopted. The same is true for the forthcoming revisions to AG 49-A,…
#347 | The Other Kind of COI Lawsuit
Quick Take When most people think about lawsuits for Cost of Insurance rates, they're thinking about situations where life insurers increased COI rates. But what about a situation where a life insurer didn't decrease COI rates even though their mortality…
#346 | Transamerica is Back (in Brokerage)
Quick Take After effectively burning the ships in 2015, the new-and-improved Transamerica is now making a concerted effort to get back into the independent brokerage channel. The tip of the spear is its new Indexed UL product, Freedom Choice IUL.…
#344 | Zurich North America Exits Indexed UL
Quick Take Zurich North America has decided to shut off new sales for its Indexed UL and Term, the latest twist in the longer-than-you-think and stranger-than-you-think story of Zurich's forays into the US life insurance market. For the past 12…
#342 | AG 49-B & The Next Phase of IUL
Quick Take AG 49-B is likely to be adopted in the next couple of weeks and implemented in March of 2023. The immediate effect will be dramatic - some accounts will see reductions in illustrated income as large as 50%.…
#336 | The Return of Guaranteed UL?
Quick Take It's tempting to think that rising rates will necessarily result in the return of cheap Guaranteed UL, but reality is a bit more complex. Cheap Guaranteed UL still exists because some companies remained willing to price under the…
