April 2024
02Apr

US. Unisys Announces $200M Pension Risk Transfer

IT technology company Unisys Corp. announced Monday it has closed an agreement with F&G Annuities & Life Inc. to purchase group annuity contracts. The agreement, which closed on March 28, will see Unisys transfer $200 million in pension liabilities from its U.S. defined benefit plan to the insurer. F&G will assume responsibility for paying out pension benefits to 3,800 Unisys retirees and beneficiaries. Notably, this is the sixth Unisys pension risk transfer transaction since January 2021, and it has contracted...

April 2, 2024
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March 2024
27Mar

Autonomy or Delegation, Libertarianism or Paternalism: What I Like for Myself and What I Like for Others on Pension Savings

By Carmen Sainz Villalba By using an online survey conducted with Bilendi&Respondi, we correlate the variables of people’s perception of howdifferent they are from others with respect to their pension plan preferences, how informed they are about financial matters in general, and what are their preferences toward the government intervention of savings plans. The empirical approach is inspired by theory results of Konrad (2023). His game-theory analysis suggest that two factors increase the citizen’s desire for autonomous economic decision-making: eccentricity...

March 27, 2024
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27Mar

US. Group of senators urge finalization of DOL fiduciary rule

Nine senators urged the Labor Department and Office of Management and Budget to quickly finalize the DOL’s proposed rule amending the definition of a fiduciary. The Labor Department proposed the Retirement Security Rule, commonly referred to as the fiduciary rule, in late October. The rule would make changes to the definition of an investment advice fiduciary under ERISA, causing one-time advice, such as rollovers, to fall under the fiduciary definition if other conditions are met. “The proposed rule ensures that every...

March 27, 2024
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26Mar

Funded Status of Largest 100 US Public Pension Funds Rises to 78.6%

Public pension funded status increased to 78.6% at the end of February, up from 77.7% the month before, according to the monthly Milliman Inc. 100 Public Pension Funding Index, which tracks the funded status of the largest 100 public defined benefit plans in the U.S. Public plan funded status rose in February to the highest level since May 2022, when funded status for these plans stood at 78.4%, and 78.6% the month before. In the interim, funded status bottomed out at...

March 26, 2024
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25Mar

U.S. pension funds sue Allianz after $4 billion in coronavirus losses

Pension funds for truckers, teachers and subway workers have lodged lawsuits in the United States against Germany's Allianz, one of the world's top asset managers, for failing to safeguard their investments during the coronavirus market meltdown. Market panic around the virus that resulted in billions in losses earlier this year scarred many investors, but no other top-tier asset manager is facing such a large number of lawsuits in the United States connected to the turbulence. In March, Allianz <ALVG.DE> was forced...

March 25, 2024
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22Mar

U.S. Pension Risk Transfer. 2023 Reflections and Looking Ahead

By AON The U.S. pension risk transfer (PRT) market saw another record-breaking year in 2023. After setting record highs for total premium in 2021 and 2022, the market set a new high-water mark for the total number of transactions in 2023 with 773 deals closing during the calendar year. These transactions resulted in $45 billion of premium transferred. Since 2012, $318 billion of pension obligations have transferred from plan sponsors to insurance companies. On the other side of the equation, insurer...

March 22, 2024
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22Mar

U.S. PRT transactions hit all-time high in 2023 – Aon

U.S. pension risk transfer transactions totaled $45 billion and set a new record for number of transactions for 2023, according to a new report from Aon. There were a total of 773 transactions, which include pension buyouts as a result of retiree liftouts and terminations, along with a small number of buy-ins in which liabilities are insured but remain with a plan sponsor, according to the report. Of that total, there were 453 terminations, 310 liftouts and 10 buy-in transactions, accounting...

March 22, 2024
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21Mar

2023 US life statutory results: Individual annuity growth hits 21-year high

A resilient domestic economy, rising interest rates and ample supply of attractive products led to outsized expansion in individual annuities during a year of otherwise mixed growth in business volumes for the US life insurance industry. According to estimates from S&P Global Market Intelligence, individual annuity direct premiums and considerations surged by 21.8% in 2023. This data, aggregated from individual entity reports available as of March 11, marks a third straight year of double-digit growth, and the most substantial annual...

March 21, 2024
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20Mar

US. Pension Risk Transfers Trigger New ERISA Litigation

March is coming in like a lion with a new “genre” of ERISA litigation. The suits—two now targeting AT&T, the other Lockheed Martin—acknowledge that the process itself is perfectly legal, but question the prudence of the decision to “offload” that pension responsibility to parties—more specifically one party in particular—deemed less financially viable to fulfill those obligations. AT&T The plaintiffs in the first AT&T suit filed March 11 in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts (Piercy et al. v....

March 20, 2024
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19Mar

US. AT&T Faces Second Lawsuit Over Pension Plan Risk Transfer

AT&T Inc. was sued for the second time in a week by retirees who say it wrongly shifted responsibility for funding the pensions of 96,000 workers to a “highly risky” insurance company owned by private equity. The latest proposed class action, filed March 15 in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, says AT&T offloaded more than $8 billion worth of pension benefits to subsidiaries of Athene Holding Ltd., which the retirees describe as “a private-equity controlled insurance company...

March 19, 2024
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