Pacific Life’s Motion to Dismiss the Busch’s Suit: Excerpts
Pacific Life's motion to dismiss the Busches' complaint against it was filed January 22, 2026 in U.S. District Court, Western District of North Carolina, by the law firms of...
Life insurers
Kyle Busch’s Crash Course in IUL
An indexed universal life policy demands about as little maintenance as an eight-cylinder, 750-horsepower, 200-mph NASCAR stock car. And in the hands of an unskilled, or untrustworthy driver, or...
When Private Equity Owns Both Sides of Your Transaction
'We’re not just watching private equity invest in carriers. We’re watching capital buy carriers, distribution, advisor platforms, and the technology layer, all at the same time,' warns the president...
News from around the Bermuda Triangle
Corebridge moves the last of American General's variable annuity business to Venerable, which is partly owned by Apollo and Athene. AM Best confirmed the ratings of Bermuda reinsurers of...
How Life Insurers Changed Alt-Asset Managers
A new research paper from Harvard Business School and State Street documents how publicly-traded alternative asset managers have channeled hundreds of billions of dollars from annuity issuers into their...
ChatGPT on Equitable, Solvency II and the Bermuda Triangle
Equitable's corporate journey since 2010 involved its separation from AXA of France. ChatGPT explains that Europe's 2016 "Solvency II" regulations accelerated the split.
TPG and Aquarian Holdings Vie to Acquire Brighthouse
Brighthouse is a top-10 annuity issuer, with over $100 billion in assets. But neither Brighthouse (or its predecessor, MetLife) ever sold many of the fixed indexed deferred annuities whose...
RIJ and ChatGPT Discuss ‘Funding Short’
Life insurers used to be known as champions of 'asset-liability matching,' or ALM. Today, many of them are doing the opposite by 'funding short.' Here's a transcript of RIJ's...
A Primer on Collateralized Loan Obligations, from ChatGPT
CLOs have boosted the yield of the general accounts of private equity-led life/annuity companies over the past decade. ChatGPT explains CLOs, using Apollo/Athene as an example.
Slow-Walking the Oversight of Insurers and CLOs: 2010 – 2025
Committees at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners since 2014 have been studying how best to regulate the purchase of collateralized loan obligation tranches by life/annuity companies from asset...
Cross-Fire: NAIC and Fed Economists Release Same-Day Zingers
On March 21, Federal Reserve economists published research warning about increases in high-risk lending by U.S. life insurers. On the same day, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners asked...
The Dimming of Brighthouse—Or a New Dawn?
The Financial Times reported last week that Brighthouse Financial wanted to sell itself. A major seller of RILAs, Brighthouse has a general account worth more than $100 billion....
Nut Case: Prudential and Brighthouse’s Bets on Pistachios
A California pistachio grower defaulted on $1 billion in loans from Prudential, Brighthouse Life, and U.S. Bank this year. Their legal efforts to seize the collateral offer a glimpse...
Middleware is Central to In-Plan Annuities
Middleware is hub-and-spoke software that lets retirement plan recordkeepers and life insurers talk to each other. Steve McCoy of iJoin, a provider of managed account user interfaces, and Bill...
Sen. Warren Speaks Up for ‘Fiduciary Rule,’ Puts Down Annuity Sales Perks
Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-MA) new white paper details the sales incentives that annuity issuers offer insurance agents; the incentives, she says, show that the DOL's long-denied 'fiduciary rule' is...
The Feeling Was De-Mutual
In the 1990s and early 2000s, a wave of household-name mutual life insurers “demutualized” and become stock companies. The conversion was driven by fundamental changes in the U.S. economy...
BlackRock relaunches its “LifePath Paycheck” retirement income tool
'DCIO' asset managers like BlackRock must find ways to retain participant assets post-retirement and enrich the value of their target date funds. They must also make themselves relevant to...
Life Insurers as LEGO Monsters
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...
Meet the Newest Platform in the 401(k) Annuity Space
'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.'
This Year’s Legal Battles
The life/annuity industry faces three big legal issues this year. All stem from, or are complicated by, the patchwork regulation of financial products in the US, our out-of-date pension...
