Ten large mutual life and annuity issuers took a hit along with just about every other financial services company in 2022.
The issuers combined for a total of about $3 billion in net income last year on $183 billion in revenue and $1.6 trillion in assets, compared with $5 billion in net income on $170 billion in revenue and $1.7 trillion in assets in 2021.
Revenue was up 7.4%, but assets fell by 6.7%, and earnings dropped by 40%.
What It Means
Last year was a tough year even for life insurers without a need to please public investors or private equity owners.
Mutual Insurers
Mutual insurers are insurance companies owned by some or all of the policyholders, meaning that some of your clients might be policyholder-owners.
They can be organized in a number of different ways.
Some may exist as bare mutual insurance companies. They may stick mainly to filing financial statements created using state regulators' statutory accounting principles.
Other mutuals have mutual holding company owners. Mutual holding companies tend to prepare and post consolidated financial reports using the same U.S. generally accepted accounting principles that companies like Google and Amazon use.
The Filings
About 20 life insurers are publicly traded. They, like other public companies, feed their financial statements into a free filings database managed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a group that helps insurance regulators draft bills and regulations and oversee insurers' finances, defrays part of the cost of its operations by taking in the statutory filings of hundreds of life insurers, health insurers and property-casualty insurers and selling the filing data.
Some insurers post full, consolidated annual statements on their websites. Insurers that own two or more insurance company subsidiaries may post separate annual statements for each insurance company subsidiary, but no consolidated report.
Our List
We created a quick look at the 2022 earnings of 10 large mutual life insurers that have posted 2022 financial statements on their websites, put 2022 earnings information in variable annuity-related documents filed with the SEC, or contributed 2022 data to NAIC data compilations.
We ranked the companies by assets, but the ranking provides only a rough indication of size, because some of the companies have reported their assets and other results using the SAP rules, and others have used the U.S. GAAP rules.
We excluded mutual insurers known mainly as health insurance providers, such as Health Care Service Corp. and Noridian.
The biggest life and annuity providers missing from the list appear to be Mutual of Omaha, USAA, State Farm, Western & Southern and OneAmerica.
