Q4 Life Sales Were Strong: Wink

Wink Inc. has interrupted the flood of bad news about COVID-19 and stock prices with some good news: Sales of non-variable U.S. individual life products looked great in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Total sales of fixed universal life insurance and whole life insurance increased 14% between the fourth quarter of 2018 and the latest quarter, to $1.8 billion.

Sales of indexed life products — which include both indexed whole life products and indexed universal life products — rose a little faster.

Resources

A summary of Wink's latest life results is available here.
An article about the previous Wink life report is available here.

Analysts at Wink have published data on individual life market performance in a summary of results from the company's latest U.S. individual life market issuer survey.

The Des Moines, Iowa-based company collects data from 51 indexed life providers, 72 universal life providers, and 76 whole life providers.

The company does not currently ask about term life insurance or variable life insurance products.

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

Indexed Life: $725 million, up 15%.
Fixed Universal Life: $352 million, up 0.8%.
Whole Life: $1.4 billion, up 19%.

Sheryl Moore, Wink's president, said in a comment on the results that, as in the third quarter, one factor affecting sales in the fourth was life insurers' moves to replace policies based on 2001 mortality tables with policies based 2017 mortality tables.

In the report, Wink also says that:

About 73% of indexed life sales came from independent agents, 13% from career agents, and 0% from registered investment advisors.
Independent agents handled 57% of universal life sales, and RIAs handled 0% of sales.
Independent agents handled 52% of whole life sales, and RIAs accounted for 0% of sales.
The S&P 500 index accounts for about 75% of indexed life sales, and a gold commodity index accounts for about 0.1% of sales.

— Read Mortality Table Shift Hits Q1 Non-Variable Life Sales, on ThinkAdvisor.

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