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Competitive market intelligence for life insurers

Annuity products are notorious for their complexity. As insurers strive to differentiate their annuities in the marketplace, they have introduced sophisticated guarantee features for policyholders to extract value from the policies over time. However, this often makes it difficult for market intelligence, sales, and product professionals to compare the pricing and value of annuity offerings. To help life insurance companies with these challenges, we developed the Market Intelligence Service Bureau — offering insight on the source of profitability, sales, and how leading annuity product compare within the market. Our Market Intelligence platform is powered by our Atlas modeling suite. It provides competitive annuity views, granularity, and the ability to easily view the economic value in the policy. For more than 20 years, the world’s largest insurers have been using Atlas for financial management of their annuity portfolios.

Independently compare the pricing and value of annuity offerings

Unlock a lifetime view of annuity products

Market Intelligence Service Bureau (MISB) takes a lifetime view of annuity product economics. Using well-established actuarial methodologies that reflect the collective experience of the insurance industry, MISB values policies over their full lifetimes, forecasting the future policy benefits and future fee income. We provide granular intelligence on product fees, withdrawals, claims, sales, profitability and expenses. The net result is a standardized comparison of product economics that goes beyond a comparison of individual policy features.

Faster stochastic calculations

The world’s largest insurers are using our Atlas high-performance stochastic calculation engine for pricing, risk management, and financial reporting. Atlas forecasts costs and benefits across thousands of hypothetical future market paths and scenarios, and is calibrated to reflect current economic conditions. MISB’s risk-neutral valuation methodology uses the same methodology that carriers, regulators, and the insurance industry use to price other financial options. The methodology avoids judgments regarding future fund performance. MISB uses a common set of actuarial assumptions to generate direct-to-direct comparisons across a broad range of insurance carriers.

Analytics that matter

Our Market Intelligence analytics provide a comprehensive view of the competitive landscape. Its responsive visualizations enable competitive benchmarking of product and rider margins, sales, and other key metrics. MISB also offers actionable insight into product design by illustrating the sources of lifetime contributors to profitability, sensitivity to economic conditions through time periods, and differences across pricing cells and policyholder demographics.

Exhibit 1: Easily view the economic value in the policy

Our Atlas Market Intelligence takes a full lifetime view. We provide granular intelligence on product fees, withdrawals, claims, sales, profitability and expenses. The net result is a standardized comparison of product economics that goes beyond a comparison of individual policy features. You can drill-down on the product, issue age, and risk tolerance to derive insights on where profitability is being generated.

 

Source: Oliver Wyman analysis

With Atlas Market Intelligence, discover how your annuity product stands against competitors

Exhibit 2: Know where you fit in the market

Benchmark you annuity products across leading competitors. Using Market Intelligence, you can view company relationships and individual product profitability and sales volumes. Leverage Atlas’s future projections to calculate the economic value of the policy and the lifetime stream fees of payments.

 

Source: Oliver Wyman analysis

Get started with Fulcrum

Atlas Market Intelligence Service Bureau is part of Oliver Wyman Fulcrum, a proprietary platform where strategy and execution meet. For more than 20 years, the world’s largest insurers have been using Atlas for financial management of their annuity portfolios. Fulcrum offers solutions across many areas of insurance including data management, new product development, policy compliance, platform migrations, portfolio compression, hedging and analytics. Our set of proprietary tools combined with Oliver Wyman product and industry expertise allows clients to maximize operational efficiency and unlock the value of your actuarial staff.