“We’re getting more than 2 percentage points of fees from the assets that are part of our annuity business,” Grier said last week at a Citigroup Inc. financial-services conference in Boston. “In your businesses, you probably would dance in the street over 40 or 50 or 60 basis points.” A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.
Hartford, Sun
Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. and Toronto-based Sun Life Financial Inc. are among insurers that scaled back from the retirement products known as variable annuities to limit risk tied to interest rates and stock market volatility.
“We’ve significantly de-risked,” Sun Life Chief Executive Officer Dean Connor said March 8 in an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York. “We want people to buy our stock not as a call option on the S&P 500, but because they believe in” the company’s plan to focus on asset management, group coverage in the U.S., insurance in Canada and expansion in Asia.