Why are we in the annuity reinsurance business?
 
Our reinsurance business provides growth capital to support primary insurance companies (called “cedents”) who sell fixed annuity contracts to U.S. retirees and other retail investors saving for retirement.
 
The annuity market is in the middle of a multi-decade transformation, where new private equity backed investors, taking advantage of the low cost of capital and the counter-cyclical nature of the annuity reinsurance business, have taken significant market share from legacy annuity insurance companies.
 
However, accessing this market is difficult. Primary annuity insurance companies are highly regulated and carry significant operating risk. Reinsurance allows Ascendant to provide capital to this growing and attractive market through agreements with annuity insurers that pass the financial benefits of the business to us, without the operational complexity.
 
In that way our reinsurance business allows us to deploy capital to a stable and negatively correlated long-term asset in a simplified form. For us, this makes annuity reinsurance an attractive business.