Linda Koco, MBA, is a contributing editor to InsuranceNewsNet, specializing in life insurance, annuities and income planning. Linda can be reached at [email protected].
It’s a myth that starting to innovate with an open canvas or white space will generate the biggest and best ideas, according to Marla Capozzi, leader of the global innovation practice at McKinsey & Co. …
Indexed universal life insurance is on a growth trajectory, according to Milliman consulting actuary Rob Stone…
A whopping 76 percent of consumers are only slightly likely or not likely at all to buy life insurance next year, according to the 2014 Insurance Barometer Study published jointly by Life Happens and LIMRA…
In a radical change to its 90-year-old retirement system, the United Kingdom plans to decouple annuities from retirement plans. Annuity professionals in the United States can glean some takeaways from the massive disassembling that is about to occur…
A new proposal from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC) includes unmistakable support for the use of annuities to secure lifetime income in retirement…
Last year was the fifth consecutive record-setting year for fixed indexed annuity (FIA) sales…
The recent sale of the world’s most valuable life insurance policy could be a sign that the big life case market is reviving…
Under the new arrangement, Nationwide has integrated LPL’s Worksite Financial Solutions platform into its 401(k) products…
Variable annuities received a few mentions in a bulletin for investors that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published recently about “How Fees and Expenses Affect Your Investment Portfolio.” …
An insurance company that primarily serves credit union members did the unexpected: It sold nearly $90 million in a new type of annuity during the closing months of last year…
The de-risked variable annuity (VA) business took it on the chin in a surprising report by Moody’s Investors Service…
Not long ago, analysts at Cerulli Associates asked older 401(k) participants a seemingly routine question about retirement income expectations. The answers received were striking for their naiveté…
If registered investment advisors (RIAs) haven’t had any federal regulators knocking on their door lately, it might be because the nation’s top cops in securities regulation don’t have the means to do so…
A U.S. Supreme Court decision on a Ponzi scheme lawsuit includes some new clarity for investment advisors who sell securities that are not traded on a national exchange…
A common thread in insurance circles is that compensation is what it takes to get on the shelf of independent agents, but LIMRA’s Patrick Leary has data that says otherwise…
The number of mergers and acquisitions in the life and health insurance sector dropped nearly 40 percent 2013, according to Deloitte LLP…
Life insurance companies didn’t exactly find themselves straining to keep up with a huge influx of applications for individual coverage in 2013…
Let it not be said that a relatively unknown annuity product cannot make major headway in sales. The object of the lesson here is the deferred income annuity (DIA). In terms of year-over-year sales growth, this product line jumped 113 percent in 2013…
The size of fines for suitability violations levied in 2013 by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) decreased substantially over the previous year, according to a major Washington law firm. So did the number of suitability cases…
“We can’t experiment any more. We need to disrupt!” Those words came from Mark Hug, the opening general session speaker at LIMRA’s annual distribution conference…
