Legal & General bullish on third quarter retirement sales

After a strong third quarter, Legal & General said its retirement arm was on track to double new business sales in the full year, with customer demand for bulk annuities and lifetime mortgages seemingly unaffected by the introduction of Solvency II regulation, Brexit uncertainty or lower interest rates.

The FTSE 100 group said after sales of more than £1.4bn in the quarter, sales from the division would be around £5.4bn for the calendar year, up from £2.9bn in 2015.

In the UK and US more than £400m of bulk annuity business was written during September alone and £1.2bn total for pension de-risking, following the £3.6m in the first half of the year to 30 June.

Also £90m of individual annuities were written in the quarter.

Having only been launched last year, lifetime mortgages delivered record sales in the quarter and are on track to top £500m of sales in 2016, having made £231m in the first half.

On the investment side, L&G has begun to invest in US infrastructure assets, to support its growing US pensions de-risking business, noting that £6,2bn of its annuity portfolio is invested in infrastructure, much of it in the UK.