A recent article in Investment News discusses a recent trend that involves the sale of proprietary annuity products through annuity marketing organizations.

Instead of building a product and then building-out distribution, some smaller insurance companies will lend their product building capacity to national marketing organizations (field marketing organizations).

These marketing organizations will then offer a private-label or proprietary annuity product exclusively through their existing distribution.

Product development tends to focus on indexed annuities.

The AltiSure Group and Advisors Excel are two field marketing organizations mentioned in the article.

The arrangement provides insurance companies with existing and presumably productive sources of distribution.  The marketing organization relationships also provide the insurers with some efficiencies with respect to suitability regulations.