CLICK HERE to view the Accumulation IUL ’17 SnapshotsOn Monday, March 13th, John Hancock released a new version of their Accumulation IUL product, now noted as ’17.
On Monday, March 13th, 2017, John Hancock released an updated version of their accumulation-oriented indexed UL offering, Accumulation IUL ’17. While mostly seeing significant improvements to distributions compared to its predecessor, this update fails to fully distinguish Accumulation IUL ’17 as one of the top aggressors in the income-based IUL market.
The release of the new ’17 version significantly improves upon its predecessor’s performance; however, overall, it only finds a few bright spots in this stacked market. The most significant improvements are most notable when illustrating at the maximum illustrated rate as well as more conservative flat rates of 6% and 5%. That said, Accumulation IUL ’17 struggles to penetrate the top quartile of the market from a competitive standpoint. Far less movement and competitive positioning can be seen when utilizing participating loans, staying by and large towards the back of the pack.
In the vein of many recent IUL product releases, Accumulation IUL ’17 now showcases a higher-capped S&P 500 indexed account, the “Plus Capped Index Account,” allowing for a higher max illustrated rate at the cost of a 1% annualized fee required for the increased cap. Accumulation IUL ’17 also introduced the Hang Seng as an alternative index in this update, which goes against the flow of recent IUL trends to remove non-S&P 500 accounts from allocation options.
As with all of John Hancock’s new releases, Accumulation IUL ’17 now offering Vitality. Qualifying for Vitality can improve performance of this product; for example, when applying Gold status to LifeTrends scenarios, cash at time of distribution improves by about 3%.
Target rankings reflect the general tenor of the product overall; with few exceptions, most scenarios find their way into the back half of the market.
CLICK HERE to view the Official Announcement PDF
CLICK HERE to view the Accumulation IUL ’17 Snapshots PDF
CLICK HERE to view the Accumulation IUL ’17 vs. ’15 PDF
