TPG and Aquarian Holdings Vie to Acquire Brighthouse
July 1, 2025 by Editorial Staff
Brighthouse is a top-10 annuity issuer, with over $100 billion in assets. But neither Brighthouse (or its predecessor, MetLife) ever sold many of the fixed indexed deferred annuities whose issuers asset managers have been acquiring as sources of capital for their private credit businesses.
Wink’s Moore on the Market: Kerry Pechter at Retirement Income Journal seems to have broken the news for us…
TPG and Aquarian Holdings have reached the final stage in the bidding process for Brighthouse Financial.
(If you recall, Aquarian is the private equity firm that owns Investors Heritage. Their annuity sales were 0.23% of the overall market, as of 1Q2025.)
“But neither Brighthouse (or MetLife) was ever a major seller of fixed indexed deferred annuities,” Pechter says.
(In fact, Investors Heritage sells more indexed annuities than Brighthouse, who only had a 0.10% share of the indexed annuity market, 1Q2025.)
Could this be a product design issue: a shortcoming on the commission structure?
(Perhaps insufficient overrides?)
I would say that distribution was an issue.
(One needs to sell through the independent agent distribution for this product; a focus on banks and wirehouses will not yield meaningful sales levels, alone.)
So, product design and distribution sealed the fate of Brighthouse, most likely. I will be interested to see what TPG and Aquarian do with the company, once this deal closes. -sjm
