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Top 10 Life, Health and Annuity Deals of 2023, So Far

Allison Bell By Allison Bell

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U.S. life, health and annuity issuers have announced more traditional mergers and acquisitions so far this year than they had announced by mid-December 2022.

The total value of the 2023 M&A deals with announced prices, or easy-to-estimate values, is about $12 billion, according to ThinkAdvisor estimates, based on companies’ own releases and reports from organizations such as S&P Global Ratings.

When we created a roughly comparable list for 2022, we found many large deal announcements involving financing or reinsurance for large blocks of business, but no announcements of big combinations or acquisitions by one company of a U.S. life, health or annuity company or of a life, health or annuity company division.

See the accompanying gallery for a list of the biggest deals with announced values that we could find, and some of the most interesting deals without announced values.

What it means: In spite of interest rate volatility and geopolitical uncertainty, one economic indicator, life and annuity M&A activity, might be starting to get back to normal.

The backdrop: Milliman found three traditional 2022 U.S. M&A deals: Universal Financial’s $307 million acquisition of the North Carolina insurance companies previously controlled by Greg Lindberg; Medical Mutual of Ohio’s $88 million acquisition of Reserve National Insurance Company; and Everly Holdings’ $70 million acquisition of Settlers Life from National Guardian Life.

But Milliman reported that the total value of announced North American transactions, including Canadian and Caribbean transactions, fell to $2.7 billion in 2022, down from $37 billion in 2021, and down from $9.5 billion in 2020.

Reasons: In addition to increasing interest rates, concerns about the effects of major accounting rule changes and geopolitical uncertainty, one factor slowing dealmaking may be the lingering effects of the period in 2020 and 2021 when COVID-19 made getting together for in-person meetings difficult.

S&P Global Ratings analysts recently said they expect to see more life and annuity M&A deals in 2024, in addition to an increase in dealmaking involving offshore reinsurance arrangements.

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