Scottish Widows, the insurance and pension arm of Lloyds Banking Group, saw a 10% increase in life and pensions sales in 2015 on the back of bulk annuity deals.
The company’s UK life pension and investment sales rose 10% from £8.6 million to £9.4 million, with £2.8 million from bulk annuity deals.
Scottish Widows entered the bulk annuity market last year after seeing individual annuity sales fall, following George Osborne’s 2014 Budget speech announcement of the pension freedom reforms.
Underlying profit increased by 4% to £962 million from £922 million. This was helped in part by Scottish Widows completing a £200 million market bulk annuity transaction in the fourth quarter of the year, building on the £2.4 billion Scottish Widows with-profits deal earlier in 2015.
By product group, underlying profits for the pensions and investments group fell from £236 million to £176 million.
Corporate pensions funds under management increased by £1.4 billion to £28.4 billion, as a further 1,600 employers and 30,000 employees became part of auto-enrolment.
New business income increased by £58 million, most of which came from bulk annuity business.
This boost was offset by reduced inidvidual annuity sales income after the pension freedoms came into force in April 2015. However, Lloyds did not say how much annuity sales fell by.
Lloyds said this was offset by a reduction in protection income, following the removal of face-to-face advice in its branch protection sales and reduced annuity income following the introduction of pension’s freedoms in 2015.
It said 215,000 customers had used its dedicated retirement planning website and customer hub.
Last year it also launched a non-advised drawdown product.
Source: New Model Adviser