Author: Roger Lawrence

The third of our reviews of the ACLI digest of US Life Insurance statistics focusses on how factors affecting the life settlement market are developing. Key amongst these are the surrender volumes, which help indicate the volumes of policies that could be available to trade, and the rate of new business.   The ACLI data are all retrospective and the latest set refers to the year 2022 which, by now, is already just over a year old compared to market participants’ current experience; it is also information of a low granularity, so one needs to be aware that there are some…

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In early November last year, industry group the American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI) published its annual Life Insurers Fact Book, the organisation’s deep dive into a range of sub-categories of the US life insurance industry. Last month, we looked at 2022’s developments in surrenders, new business and solvency; this month, we’re taking a look at the US life insurance market as a whole: Its health; size and outlook.  Ownership Trends  For a long while, US-based insurers have been, and remain, owned primarily by US investors and corporations. The percentage that is US-owned tends to hover around the 85-90% mark.…

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In early November last year, industry group the American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI) published its annual Life Insurers Fact Book, the organisation’s deep dive in to a range of sub-categories of the US life insurance industry.  As always, there are many notable takeaways from the document. Some of the most notable include the following:   After a record high for total claims payments made on life insurance contracts in 2021, 2022 saw a fall back. Death claims paid on individual life contracts fell 7.7% from $73bn to $66bn  Surrender payments rose 5.3% from $27.4bn to $28.8bn  Aggregate assets of insurers…

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More than 200 years ago, Equitable Life, the now defunct UK mutual life insurer, realised that they were making excess profits and started distributing them to policyholders via reductions in the following years’ premium. This profit distribution evolved into making annual increases to the sums insured; the next evolutionary iteration was to deliberately load premiums to allow for scope to intentionally generate “profits” by diverting the additional margin into riskier but hopefully more profitable assets. Finally, insurers were doing so well, especially from a buoyant stock market, they began adding a further “terminal” bonus to pay-outs funded from the excess…

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Defined Benefit (DB) pension schemes in which the employer bears the investment and longevity risk have been on a downward journey to eventual extinction in the U.K. and many other jurisdictions for years. Extending life spans and low investment returns have combined to make running these schemes far too operationally risky for most employers including many of the largest. To cap increasing liabilities, most have either closed to new members (the lowest level of intervention), through to also stopping new accrual of entitlements for existing workers, and on to eventual buy-out or other run off strategies. The market for these…

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