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#451 | The Packaged Product Opportunity
At the heart of modern asset management is a very simple concept – individual assets can be combined in strategic ways to produce superior long-term outcomes. They are, in other words, in the business of making a meal out of…
#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…
#449 | A DIR Proof Point
AI was used to proof-read and cross-reference existing articles. No part of this article was written with the assistance of AI. There is probably no single metric as broadly misunderstood within the industry – and maligned outside of the industry…
#448 | The End of the Road for PHL Variable
If a life insurance company is going to descend, then the way that it should descend is slow and steady. Unfortunately, that’s not usually how things go. Instead, the decline of a life insurer usually follows a very different pattern…
#447 | 7702 Rate Update for 2025
We’ve spilled a fair amount of ink on 7702 rates since the rate regime changed in 2021, starting with #257 | The Section 7702 Christmas Miracle. Symetra was the first carrier to incorporate the new rates into illustrations, which we…
#446 | The Express Underwriting Revolution
In the fall of 2013, I found myself at a conference and sitting through a presentation that I would usually have assiduously avoided – the future of underwriting, as seen through the lens of a consultant at Deloitte. The fact…
#445 | Making the Market for Life Insurance
Full Article For as long as I’ve been in the life insurance industry, there has been persistent chatter about the life insurance “need-gap” reported by the annual LIMRA/Life Happens Insurance Barometer Study. The need-gap “represents the total level of self-reported…
#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…
#443 | Busch v Pacific Life
Image: AP It’s been a very long time since anything related to life insurance has broken into mainstream media. Larry King famously claimed to be scammed by a STOLI transaction that had been executed with his approval and paid him…
#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…
