Integrity Marketing — a big, rapidly growing life insurance and annuity distributor — today announced a deal that could turn it into a giant life and annuity product designer.
The Dallas-based company has agreed to acquire Annexus, a company best known as a company that designs annuities and permanent life insurance products for companies like AIG, Athene, Nationwide, Securian and Transamerica.
Neither company has talked about the deal price.
What It Means
A company with roots in product distribution, rather than general account management or claim administration, could soon play a bigger role in shaping the products clients use to create and protect streams of retirement income.
For agents and advisors, the question may be how Integrity Marketing will balance the goals of creating products that appeal to retirement savers at the point of purchase and that work as expected when the product owners file claims or ask for withdrawals.
The Companies
Integrity Marketing came to life in 2006.
The company started out as a firm that focused on distributing Medicare Advantage plans and Medicare supplement insurance policies.
In 2016, the company began to work with HGGC, a private equity firm. It now has relationships with two other private equity firms, Harvest Partners and Silver Lake, as well as with HGGC.
Today, Integrity Marketing has relationships with about 500,000 agents and advisors and 11 million clients.
It estimates that it will help insurers place 2022 sales that will generate $20 billion in premium payments, and that its RIA and broker-dealer arms will help financial services companies oversee $20 billion of assets under management and advisement.
Annexus was also formed in 2006.
The company is best known for its efforts to develop nonvariable indexed annuity and indexed universal life products and to create the modern U.S. markets for those products.
Funds advised by Blackstone acquired a minority stake in Annexus in 2019. The size of the investment was not disclosed but was described as being "strategic."
Annexus expects to place 2022 annuity sales that will generate about $7 billion in annuity premium payments.
The Deal
Integrity Marketing says it will buy out previous Annexus investors, including the funds advised by Blackstone.
