StanCorp Financial Group (The Standard) has made a benefits deal that could help it expand sales of retirement plans.
The Portland, Oregon-based life insurance, annuity and benefits provider has agreed to buy the life and disability arm of Elevance Health, which provides insurance for about 4.8 million people.
Elevance — the Indianapolis-based company formerly known as Anthem — will continue to provide health coverage for 47 million people and tens of thousands of employers.
What It Means
The Standard is still out there playing ball with companies like Empower Retirement, ADP and Transamerica the group life, group disability and retirement plan markets.
The Companies
Meiji Yasuda, a life insurer based in Japan, acquired The Standard in 2016.
The Standard ranked sixth in terms of in-force policy premium revenue in Milliman's U.S. group disability market survey for 2021.
Elevance did not participate in the survey but may have ranked in the top 20 if it had.
Elevance is a publicly traded company in the United States. The Standard is not.
Because Elevance is a publicly traded company, it would have had to apply the new long-duration targeted improvement guidelines to its disability insurance business if it kept it.
The new rules, which are part of the U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, will require affected companies to put estimates of benefits obligation value changes in their earnings every quarter and could make some insurers' earnings more volatile.
