Latest Content
#455 | The Puzzle of Older Age Pricing
How old is too old to buy life insurance? Most carriers will issue policies until at least age 80, but a handful will issue them all the way up to age 90. John Hancock and MassMutual will even issue Preferred…
#454 | Rethinking the Role of Engineered Indices
Author's Note - This one is admittedly pretty wonky. Such is the nature of the topic. But it's worth the payoff at the end! Introduction On February 24th, a new subcommittee of the NAIC A Committee specifically formed to address…
#453 | Searching for Certainty in All the Wrong Places
Questions from astute readers answered after the article Ask people what they want their life insurance policy to be and they’ll probably say “cheap.” That’s understandable given the bombardment every day of commercials from P&C companies advocating for folks to…
#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…
#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…
