Publicly Traded Life and Annuity Issuers Prepare to Talk About COVID-19 With Investors

By Allison Bell

April 22, 2020 at 01:58 PM

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Executives from UnitedHealth Group Inc. kicked off life and health insurers' new earnings release season a week ago, with a preview of how companies will talk about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on their operations and future prospects. Now executives from the rest of the publicly traded life and health companies will get their turn to talk about what COVID-19 has done to employees, customers, sales, marketing, claims, investment portfolios, and overall interest in life insurance, annuities, health insurance, and related products and services. (Related: Fund to Help the Survivors of Workers Who Die Fighting COVID-19) Insurance company executives spent most of the conference calls they held to discuss 2019 quarterly earnings with securities analysts talking about concerns about interest rates, and efforts to emphasize less interest-sensitive products. Now, they'll get to talk about the impact of the pandemic on interest rates, and on general investment market liquidity, and on thoughts about the new Federal Reserve system efforts to keep the private investment markets moving, by buying instruments such as investment-grade corporate bonds. The first life and annuity issuer to release earnings for the first quarter of 2020 will be Globe Life Inc. — the company formerly known as Torchmark. Globe Life is preparing to release its first-quarter earnings sometime after about 4 p.m. today, and then hold a conference call with analysts around 11 a.m. Eastern time tomorrow. The other publicly traded insurers usually have their own post-earnings release calls with the analysts. Members of the public, including insurance agents and brokers, can listen, either on the live call or to a recording, to hear what the insurance company executives are telling investors on Wall Street. One way to find the earnings releases and links to the conference calls is to go to each company's investor relations website section. Another way is to use the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's filing system to look at a company's earnings release. The earnings release usually provides instructions readers can use to see the earnings call. An insurer's SEC filing page will also include links to many other documents put out by the insurer. The following list gives each company's anticipated earnings release date and the "stock symbol" it uses to identify itself to investors. Click on the stock symbol to see the company's SEC filing page. April 15