What Bermuda's New Rules Really Mean, and 9 Other Burning Questions

What You Need to Know

As 2023 passes, relatively quietly, attention shifts to pressing issues for the coming year.
That mean more discussion around the Labor Department’s fiduciary standard rules on annuity professionals.
Interest rates and borrowers’ ability to refinance will be watched as they relate to industry investment portfolios.

What might be the most surprising thing about 2023 is that, for life insurance and annuity market players, it wasn’t all that surprising, or cataclysmic.

Interest rates were fine. Credit markets were uneasy but, mostly, fine. Sales were great.

The U.S. Department of Labor revived its effort to impose broad fiduciary responsibilities on anyone using retirees’ rollover assets to pay for annuities, but the actual rules haven’t changed yet.

The top question for 2024 will be about the efforts by the Bermuda Monetary Authority to update its capital accounting rules, to respond to suggestions that U.S. life and annuity businesses is moving there because Bermuda is a relatively easy capital grader.

If Bermuda goes ahead with a capital rules update, how much effect will the changes really have, and how will that affect which insurers are hot and which are not?

And here are nine other questions for the new year.

2. Will interest rates stay friendly?

3. Will borrowers’ problems with refinancing office mortgages and other forms of debt shake life and annuity issuers’ giant investment portfolios?