Fidelity & Guaranty Life Insurance Co. has acquired a 30% stake in Freedom Equity Group — an independent marketing organization that focuses on the sale of index universal life (IUL) insurance and index annuities.
F&G says it's acquiring the Arroyo Grande, California-based IMO in an effort to diversify by expanding sales of IUL policies to middle-income consumers.
The deal could mean that insurers are about to focus more heavily on the creation and distribution of cash-value life insurance.
IUL products could get a big sales boost if Congress ends up making significant changes to federal income tax rules, because, in the past, high-income and moderate-income families have used life insurance as a vehicle for managing exposure to income taxes.
F&G is a Des Moines, Iowa-based life and annuity issuer that's now part of Fidelity National Financial, a title insurer. The company has been best known as a supplier of annuities.
F&G has already been distributing IUL policies through Freedom Equity Group. The company says it hopes the investment in the IMO will help it fuel IUL product sales growth.
Other F&G efforts at diversification include a move to enter the pension risk transfer market, by selling group annuities to employers that want to shed responsibility for defined benefit pension plans.
Other companies in the life, annuity and health sectors have also announced deals in the past few weeks.
Integrity Marketing Group
Integrity Marketing — a Dallas-based insurance marketing organization — has completed three new deals.
The biggest is for WealthFirm, a Norfolk, Nebraska-based company that began as an accounting firm in 1948.
The company formed WealthManagement LLC, a registered investment advisor, in 1997, and Retirement Plan Consultants LLC, a retirement planning firm, in 2008.
WealthFirm now serves 1,800 retirement plans with 17,500 plan participants, and it helps clients manage $3.5 billion in assets.
Nancy Brozek and Jared Faltys, the co-CEOs of WealthFirm, will become managing partners with Integrity Marketing.
Integrity Marketing has also acquired two life, health and annuity IMOs: Shields Brokerage, an Exeter, New Hampshire-based firm that was founded in 1981, and D&D Insurance, a Ferndale, Washington-based firm that was founded in 2005.
