American National Insurance Co. has introduced an online platform for purchasing fixed annuities, marking a step in its broader shift away from life insurance and toward other business lines such as annuities, pension risk transfer, and property and casualty insurance. 

The digital portal was launched ahead of the company’s formal decision to stop writing new life insurance policies. 

Read via Insurance Business

Wink’s Moore on the Market: I don’t know how I didn’t notice this…

American National has gone D2C on their annuities.

It appears that the D2C rates are more competitive as the independent agent annuity rates; as it should be.

(I cannot imagine their insurance agents are very happy about that though.)

It looks like independent agents accounted for 63% of their Multi-Year Guaranteed Annuity sales, the last quarter that we reported.

How will the company avoid channel conflict?

There are strategies that work. We will keep our eyes peeled, to see how things progress. -sjm