An annuity writer's yield is earned on the asset side and owed on the liability side, so I price every loan for the day we might have to sell it.
I am the chief financial officer of Wrenfield Financial Group, a fictional life and annuity company based in Louisville, Kentucky, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Our operating insurer sells fixed indexed, multi-year fixed and income annuities through independent marketing organisations, banks and broker-dealers. At the end of 2025 we held $46.8 billion of general-account assets for about 610,000 policyholders, and during the year we sold $6.1 billion of new annuities. The business is a spread: what the portfolio earns, less what we credit to policyholders, less the cost of running the company and holding capital against both.
I came to the job from the asset side, which is less usual than it should be. I audited insurers in Chicago, spent ten years negotiating covenants and working out defaulted private placements at a mutual life company in Columbus, and five more running asset-liability management for the US arm of a European life reinsurer in Charlotte. Wrenfield hired me as treasurer in 2016, and I became CFO in January 2020, ten weeks before credit markets seized.
The decisions I am asked about most came later. In 2022 we took a minority investor's capital while declining to hand it most of our portfolio. In 2023 and 2024 we let $2.3 billion of annuities leave when their surrender charges expired, rather than paying to keep them, and we sold office mortgage loans at a loss before appraisals forced the question. Each choice made a quarter look worse, and each rested on one conviction: a yield is real only if the asset behind it would fetch a fair price on a day we did not pick.
Capital without surrendering the portfolio
In 2022 we accepted $410 million for a 9.6 per cent stake from Thresholm Capital Partners but capped its investment mandate at about $5 billion, against the $12 billion it proposed. A valuation firm chosen by our Audit Committee prices every position it manages.
Surrenders met without a fire sale
When $3.7 billion of annuities came free of surrender charges in 2023 and 2024, we renewed at 4.1 per cent rather than the 4.9 per cent our distributors wanted. $2.3 billion left; borrowing arranged a year early and timed maturities kept realised losses to $160 million.
Office loans halved before the market turned
We sold $420 million of our weakest office mortgage loans in late 2023 at an average of 71 cents on the dollar, a $165 million pre-tax charge with allowances. Office exposure fell from $1.7 billion to $880 million by December 2025.
A closed care block transferred
In July 2025 we reinsured 41,000 long-term care policies to a fictional reinsurer, Sallowfield Re, paying $240 million above the $1.4 billion of statutory reserves transferred. Our risk-based capital ratio ended 2025 at 415 per cent, up from 400 a year earlier.
Current focus
I am preparing the board's 2027 capital plan, which must decide how much of the capital released by the care transaction returns to shareholders and how much supports a larger share of income annuities. Alongside it, I am rebuilding our liquidity stress test so that every surrender-charge expiry date is treated as a contractual maturity.
Conversations I welcome
I am not looking to leave Wrenfield. With my board's consent I would consider one independent directorship at a US-listed company outside life insurance and annuities, joining its Audit Committee and, once I know the business, chairing it. Twenty-five days a year is what I can offer. I also accept occasional invitations to speak to audit-committee and insurance-finance audiences.