BRITISH insurers are sitting on a £120bn pile of annuity business that is waiting to be plundered by pension fund buyout companies, according to Isabel Hudson, chief executive of Synesis Life, the market's newest entrant, reports the Times.
Hudson, formerly a distribution director at Prudential, tells the paper the value of annuities being paid out by UK life insurers was growing by as much as £10bn a year. It says an increasing number of insurers are keen to offload their annuity business — as demonstrated last month by the sale of Equitable Life’s £4.6 billion book of annuities to Canada Life — because the business made the investment and capital requirements of their with-profits funds more complex, she said. “There’s a huge amount of money swashing around, but not that much talent,” she said. In 2004 the Oxford graduate...
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