Wink Sees Strong Whole Life Sales

Whole life policies probably sold well in the third quarter, but sales of two other major types of non-variable permanent life insurance policies were probably soft.

Analysts at Wink Inc. are reporting data supporting those conclusions in a summary of results from the company's latest U.S. individual life market issuer survey.

The Des Moines, Iowa-based company asks companies about sales of U.S. individual whole life, traditional universal life, and indexed life. The company's indexed life insurance policy sales category includes indexed whole life insurance along with indexed universal life policies.

The company does not currently have a survey program for term life insurance or variable life insurance products, and it has had better luck with rounding up indexed life sales data than with getting data on the whole life and traditional universal life markets. Wink estimates that it has data on about 97% of indexed life sales, about 66% of universal life sales, and about 33% of whole life sales.

Here's how Wink life sales data for the latest quarter compared with sales figures for the third quarter of 2018:

Indexed Life: $529 million, down about 0.1%.
Traditional Universal Life: $288 million, down 17%.
Whole Life: $1.1 billion, up 7.2%.

Sheryl Moore, Wink's president, said in a statement that one factor affecting sales may be life insurers' moves to retire products based 2001 mortality tables. Life insurers are now replacing those products with policies based on 2017 mortality tables.

"I am anticipating that the fourth quarter will be stronger," Moore said in the statement.