Brighthouse Buyout Comes Down to One Bidder and Plenty of Doubts
September 16, 2025 by Alexandre Rajbhandari
Back in January when news broke that Brighthouse Financial was seeking to sell itself, investors cheered and almost immediately bid up shares of the life insurer by 25%. Seven months later, there’s not so much to celebrate anymore.
Wall Street heavy hitters including Apollo Global Management, Carlyle Group and TPG have passed on bidding for Brighthouse or dropped out, according to people familiar with the process, and the stock trades lower than before the takeover talk.
Wink’s Moore on the Market: Is Aquarian Holdings, parent company of Investors Heritage, going to buy Brighthouse Financial?
Hard to say.
I mean, Brighthouse IS more than nine times Aquarian’s size, by assets.
And there aren’t exactly a line of bidders at this point.
My friend Jimmy Bhullar at J.P. Morgan had this to say, “…modest growth and subpar profit prospects gave Brighthouse a not-so-bright outlook, which proved prescient. The stock never got a buy rating from more than 20% of analysts covering it at any one time, and the shares have lost almost a third of their value since their debut.”
In fact, “an actuary report showed that any buyer would have to increase the firm’s reserves by potentially billions of dollars…”
Features like annuity living benefits and life insurance no lapse guarantees can do that to an insurer looking to sell.
Not exactly an attractive issue for potential suitors…
Speaking of reserves-
“To me it’s gold,” said my friend Bruce Friedland, MBA, an actuary providing services through Graeme Group, an actuarial consulting firm, and who also owns a policy with Brighthouse. “It’s got a reasonable premium and, you know, they’re gonna be on the hook for a long time.”
“For Brighthouse, though, those products require additional reserves in market downturns, which gobbles up capital. Some of the pressure was eased with products that have offsetting risk profiles, and hedges against market gyrations.”
In the last stage of bidding, Aquarian’s offer for Brighthouse exceeded $3 billion, more than what most others were ready to offer apparently.
Brighthouse has a 2.31% market share, when it comes to the annuity market and is one of the biggest sellers of structured annuities/RILAs. -sjm
