Michael Gordon, CEO of Axonic Insurance, part of Axonic Capital, sees the future of the life/annuity/asset-management business as an increasingly a la carte affair, where the components of the business are like interchangeable Lego blocks and where platform providers help clients snap them together.

'We’re a product design firm,' ALEXIncome co-founder E. Graham Clark told RIJ. 'We feel we’ve built the best process for integrating annuities into retirement accounts.'

'The ability of insurers to significantly lower the total asset requirement for long-duration blocks of business that rely heavily on asset returns appears to be one of the drivers of the significant increase in reinsurance transactions,” wrote a New Jersey and an Iowa insurance regulator. 'A stunning development,' said one federal official.