For financial planners and life insurance agents, more competition in the annuity sales market may be coming from the insurers writing the annuities.
A research team working for Nationwide Annuity maps annuity shopping paths in a new summary of results from a survey of 300 U.S. planner or advisor clients who own individual annuities.
About 68% of the participants said they bought their annuities from their planners, but 13% bought their contracts directly from the companies that wrote the contracts.
For the survey participants who had bought their annuities since 2019, the direct purchase share was 17%, indicating that insurers' slice of the sales may be about 31% bigger than it was just a few years ago.
About 20% of the participants with multiple annuities had bought at least one of their contracts from the issuers.
What it means: Life insurers may typically sell their annuities through agents and planners, but they don't have to.
The survey: Nationwide is a big annuity writer.
The company fielded the survey through an online system in February. All of the participants were ages 50 through 74. None had started receiving income from their annuities.
