Retirees Need Simple, Stable Annuity Options: Corebridge

Multi-year guaranteed annuities (MYGAs) are like the hammer in the carpenter’s toolbox. They’re so common they often get overlooked.

But Bryan Pinsky, president of individual retirement at Corebridge Financial, said in a recent interview that Corebridge is happy to be in the multi-year market.

“It’s a very robust and very important market for retirees,” Pinsky said. “We’ve been very happy with that market as rates have been going up.”

Why it matters: The health of the multi-year guaranteed annuities market is critical to retirement savers, because they use the product to protect some or all of their most conservatively managed assets.

The basics: A MYGA is an annuity contract that pays a fixed, guaranteed rate of interest for a specified number of years.

Multi-year guaranteed annuities contracts accounted for 43% of all first-half individual deferred U.S. annuity sales tracked by Wink surveys. MYGA sales increased 71% between the first half of 2022 and the first half of this year, to $70 billion, as total individual deferred annuity sales increased 24%.

Corebridge completed $4.3 billion in MYGA sales in the first half fo this year.

Pinsky’s views: Earlier in the year, Marc Rowan, the CEO of Apollo Global Management, Athene’s parent, suggested that the MYGA market was unappealing.