Fixed Annuity Sales on an Upward Trend

Last week, a group of experts at the Retirement Institute’s Action 2019 conference talked about everything related to products and fixed annuity and determined that fixed indexed annuities might continue on an upward trend.

“You cannot get what this product provides for anywhere else,” said Kevin Mechtley, of Sammons Financial Group. Mechtley serves as their director of government affairs, as well as their vice president and legal director. He says the upward trend of fixed and fixed indexed annuities are subject to the trends of the industry itself, which is in good standing right now.

For example, in the last quarter of 2018, the traditional fixed annuity was up 15.9 percent from the quarter before, which comes out to about 1.1 billion dollars. This is on top of already stellar growth of 56.8 percent, from where it was at this time the year before.

Ninety-six billion dollars by December of 2023 is the expected projected sales of fixed index annuities if all these trends continue. LIMRA has estimated it at a 38 percent rise, and 26.4 billion dollars higher than their same projections from the year prior.

According to Dave Fuller, the senior director for Allianz Life, improvements in technology should help push sales on every end of the process. The same goes for new regulatory statues. All of these efforts should make it less stressful on advisors who are reviewing the financial plan of a client and wish to start investing in annuities and will help open up other new channels in this regard.

Mechtley stated: “Those sales in the RIA channel are the wide blue ocean. There’s a lot of sales to be gained there.”

Another outgrowth of the federal appeals courts fiduciary ruling is that the trail commission option is becoming a route that a lot of distributors are looking into. According to the general counsel for Advisors Excel, David Wolfe, firms have to be at a certain size if they hope to pay a recurring trail instead of having to pay the upfront big fees.