Industry Commentary
#224 | The Tangled Reinsurance Web – Part 5 – The Power of Coinsurance
The tension between growth and capital is as old as time, but it takes on a unique dimension for life insurers. Most businesses view capital as a cushion to ride out temporary setbacks in the core business or to fund…
#223 | The Tangled Reinsurance Web – Part 4 – Coinsurance and Capital
As we’ve already seen, the power of coinsurance is that a life insurer can essentially borrow the economics of another life insurer within the defined confines of the reinsurance treaty. It’s not unlike what John and Jeremy, the protagonists of…
#220 | The Tangled Reinsurance Web – Part 3 – Coinsurance
For all of its subtleties, coinsurance is exactly what it sounds like – co-insurance. Both the direct writer and the reinsurer are on the hook for the liability, the reserves and the capital in proportion to the coinsurance agreement. But,…
#219 | The Tangled Reinsurance Web – Part 2 – YRT
If life insurance companies are a prism struck by white light, which represents the combined risks embedded in each policy they sell, then reinsurers specialize in particular parts of the light spectrum splaying out on the wall behind the prism.…
#218 | The Tangled Reinsurance Web – Part 1
COVID-19 has certainly changed a lot of things and one of them is that, for the first time in a long time, the question of mortality risk exposure for life insurers is suddenly on the table. This might seem like…
#195 | Voya (Predictably) Sells its Legacy Life Blocks
Yesterday, Voya announced that it has entered into an agreement to sell the entirety of its legacy life insurance block to Resolution Life, the UK-based company that acquired Lincoln Benefit Life a few years ago. TO READ FULL STORY JOIN…
#182 | Why You Should Care About Prudential Buying Assurance IQ for $2.35 Billion
The hottest insurance news this week (hell, probably this year) is that Prudential plunked down $2.35 billion for Assurance IQ, a start-up life insurance firm, with an extra $1.15 billion in earnout if Assurance IQ hits certain objectives. The mainstream…
#173 | TIAA Exits Individual Life
Another one bites the dust – but this time, it’s not a publicly-held conglomerate spinning off or shutting down a brokerage-oriented individual life insurance unit. Instead, it’s TIAA, a non-profit company selling fee-based life insurance products through RIAs and commission-based…
#143 | Protective Acquires Great-West US Life & Annuity
Last week, Protective announced that it has acquired Canada’s Great-West’s US Individual Life & Annuity business. In one way, this is like yet another The Fast & The Furious movie – you know the script by now. Large insurers with…
#136 | Leveraged Loans & Life Insurance
2/25/19 update - Bloomberg on a Fitch report about growing life insurer exposure to CLOs Over the past couple of years, the financial press and even some mainstream publications have begun to talk about a burgeoning “bubble” in leveraged loans,…
