Product Reviews
#452 | Beyond Term: Everly TermVest+
Over the past few years, there has been a veritable flood of new entrants to the annuity market. Virtually all of them are running the same playbook – an alternative asset manager buys a dormant life insurer, infuses it with…
#450 | John Hancock Accumulation IUL 26
No company innovates in life insurance product with greater frequency or with more intentionality than John Hancock. The list of category-busting products that John Hancock has basically built on-spec is long – Performance UL, Protection UL, Simplified Life, Premier Benefit…
#444 | Protective and the Third Way in Variable UL
The new business franchise at Protective occupies a distinct corner of the life insurance market. Whereas most insurers over the past decade have shifted hard towards accumulation sales, Protective lives up to its name by remaining stubbornly focused on protection-oriented…
#442 | A New Era for Blending at Pacific Life
10/29/2025 Update - Last night, two-time NASCAR Cup Champion Kyle Busch and his wife Samantha Busch announced that they were suing Pacific Life over an $8.5 million loss in an Indexed UL policy. The complaint, which is now public, makes…
#439 | The VA-ization of Prudential VUL Protector
One of the mysterious things about the persistent rise of the Guaranteed VUL market has been the simultaneous decline in the market for Variable Annuities with Living Benefits (VALB). The peak of the VALB market was in 2007 and it…
#432 | North American Secure Horizon IUL
Over the past few years, there has been a pronounced convergence of the Fixed Indexed Annuity (FIA) and Indexed UL markets both in terms of distribution and product development. One of the clearest examples is the fact that Annexus, the…
#429 | Lincoln WealthBuilder IUL
Aside from some modest recent revisions to AssetEdge VUL/SVUL and lowering prices on Term, the recent introduction of WealthBuilder IUL marks Lincoln’s first real move towards recapturing marketshare in the life insurance market after exiting VULone. Despite the new name,…
#428 | John Hancock LifeCare
To say that John Hancock has scar tissue from Long Term Care insurance would be an understatement. Like many insurers, John Hancock sold stand-alone LTC back when the market was frothy from roughly 1995 to 2005, eventually amassing around $10…
#422 | Equitable Exits Third Party Distribution
At the tail end of last year, Equitable announced that it has decided to “focus our life insurance third-party distribution efforts exclusively on our COIL Institutional Series” and “will no longer accept new life insurance applications for all other products…
#417 | EquiTrust Wealth Max Bonus Life
EquiTrust isn’t a household name in life insurance, but it is fast becoming one in annuities. EquiTrust was originally a part of Farm Bureau Life but was bought by Guggenheim in 2011. Guggenheim was one of the first institutional investors…
