Nucleus' Ferguson: Where now for life companies?

The recent round of life company results has thrown up a number of fascinating figures, many of which appear to contradict and almost none of which really seem to make sense. I guess it is pretty easy to observe that the boom days are behind the sector and also that whether one measures performance on an IFRS or an embedded value basis the numbers just ain't as good as they used to be. There also seems to be an almost universal acceptance that the old way of doing business is confined to the past and the future will be a lot less capital intensive. Quite how that squares with some of th...