Pacific Life brings new indexed universal life product to market

PacLife is out with a new indexed universal life product.

By John Hilton

Pacific Life Insurance Co. describes its new flagship indexed universal life insurance offering as "aimed at affluent clients who need competitively priced life insurance protection and significant flexibility in their retirement and estate plans."

The insurer introduced Pacific Horizon IUL 2 earlier this month, touting its tax-free death benefit and tax-free distributions to help supplement retirement income.

“Pacific Horizon IUL 2 is an evolutionary product, built on the most successful product features of Pacific Life’s past IUL products,” Dawn Behnke, executive vice president, consumer markets business, said in a news release. “With a variety of choices, Pacific Horizon IUL 2 provides financial professionals with the versatility to help meet their clients’ legacy, income, and business planning needs, with the simplicity of having it all within one product.”

The new IUL offers three coverage design options for a choice of higher early year cash surrender values, greater long-term accumulation potential, or a balance between the two.

Likewise, three rider designs—including the new Plus design with a level rider charge rate—offer a potential boost to policy performance in exchange for a monthly rider charge, the release said. Five indexed accounts offer varying credit strategies, including one-year, multi-year, and volatility control indexed accounts as well as a fixed account.

John Church, assistant vice president, product marketing, consumer markets business, for Pacific Life, recently spoke with InsuranceNewsNet about the new IUL product:

INN: What is unique about this product?

Church: "It brings together many of our popular product riders and features into one IUL product. Prior to this product launch, we had like four or five single-life IUL products. So this basically brings a lot of those features and riders into one spot and allows us to simplify the product lineup. At the same time, it allows us to bring some new features into that product lineup that maybe we didn't have in the IUL space."

INN: What does this product do for Pacific Life?

Church: "It gives financial professionals the versatility to create solutions for their client needs in one place. Instead of looking at multiple products, they they have that versatile product to create that solution."

INN: Is the product available in all 50 states?

Church: "It will be available in every state except New York."

INN: Who is this product aimed at from a consumer standpoint?

Church: "It works for anybody who's looking for death benefit protection, with or without a policy. And it's also for clients that are looking for potential cash value accumulation or some combination of both."

INN: How will you distribute this product?

Church: "We're pretty straightforward at Pacific life. All of our life insurance products are distributed through independent financial advisors."

InsuranceNewsNet Senior Editor John Hilton covered business and other beats in more than 20 years of daily journalism. John may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @INNJohnH.

InsuranceNewsNet Senior Editor John Hilton has covered business and other beats in more than 20 years of daily journalism. John may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @INNJohnH.