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| GNW > SEC Filings for GNW > Form 10-K on 2-Mar-2009 | All Recent SEC Filings |
2-Mar-2009
Annual Report
The following discussion and analysis of our consolidated financial condition and results of operations should be read in conjunction with our audited consolidated financial statements and related notes included in "Item 8-Financial Statements and Supplementary Data."
Overview
Our business
We are a leading financial security company dedicated to providing insurance, wealth management, investment and financial solutions to more than 15 million customers, with a presence in more than 25 countries. We have three operating segments: Retirement and Protection, International and U.S. Mortgage Insurance.
• Retirement and Protection. We offer a variety of protection, wealth management, retirement income and institutional products. Our primary protection products include: life, long-term care and Medicare supplement insurance. Additionally, we offer wellness and care coordination services for our long-term care policyholders. Our retirement income and wealth management products include: fixed and variable deferred and immediate individual annuities, group variable annuities offered through retirement plans, and a variety of managed account programs, financial planning services and mutual funds. Most of our variable annuities include a GMDB. Some of our group and individual variable annuity products include guaranteed minimum benefit features such as GMWB and certain types of guaranteed annuitization benefits. Institutional products include: funding agreements, FABNs and GICs. For the year ended December 31, 2008, our Retirement and Protection segment's net loss was $620 million and net operating income was $301 million.
• International. We are a leading provider of mortgage insurance products in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and multiple European countries. We primarily offer products in the flow market. On a limited basis, we also provide mortgage insurance on a structured, or bulk, basis that aids in the sale of mortgages to the capital markets and helps lenders manage capital and risk. Additionally, we offer services, analytical tools and technology that enable lenders to operate efficiently and manage risk. We also offer payment protection coverages in multiple European countries, Canada and Mexico. Our lifestyle protection insurance products help consumers meet specified payment obligations should they become unable to pay due to accident, illness, involuntary unemployment, disability or death. For the year ended December 31, 2008, our International segment's net income and net operating income were $608 million and $633 million, respectively.
• U.S. Mortgage Insurance. In the U.S., we offer mortgage insurance products predominantly insuring prime-based, individually underwritten residential mortgage loans, also known as flow mortgage insurance. We selectively provide mortgage insurance on a structured, or bulk, basis with essentially all of our bulk writings prime-based. Additionally, we offer services, analytical tools and technology that enable lenders to operate efficiently and manage risk. For the year ended December 31, 2008, our U.S. Mortgage Insurance segment's net loss and net operating loss were $368 million and $330 million, respectively.
We also have Corporate and Other activities which include debt financing expenses that are incurred at our holding company level, unallocated corporate income and expenses, eliminations of inter-segment transactions, the results of non-core businesses that are managed outside of our operating segments and our group life and health insurance business, which we sold on May 31, 2007. For the year ended December 31, 2008, Corporate and Other activities had a loss from continuing operations and a net operating loss of $192 million and $135 million, respectively.
Our financial information
The financial information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K has been derived from our consolidated financial statements. Our consolidated financial statements included our group life and health insurance business that was presented in our consolidated financial statements as discontinued operations until sold in May 2007. See note 4 to our consolidated financial statements under "Item 8-Financial Statements and Supplementary Data" for further discussion of our discontinued operations.
Revenues and expenses
Our revenues consist primarily of the following:
• Retirement and Protection. The revenues in our Retirement and Protection segment consist primarily of:
• net premiums earned on individual term life insurance, individual and group long-term care insurance, Medicare supplement insurance, single premium immediate annuities and structured settlements with life contingencies;
• net investment income and net investment gains (losses) allocated to this segment; and
• insurance and investment product fees and other, including surrender charges, mortality and expense risk charges, primarily from variable annuity and universal life insurance policies, management fees and commissions from wealth management products, and other administrative charges.
• International. The revenues in our International segment consist primarily of:
• net premiums earned on international mortgage and lifestyle protection insurance policies;
• net investment income and net investment gains (losses) on the separate investment portfolio held by our international mortgage and lifestyle protection insurance businesses; and
• insurance and investment product fees and other, primarily third-party administration fees from our lifestyle protection insurance business.
• U.S. Mortgage Insurance. The revenues in our U.S. Mortgage Insurance segment consist primarily of:
• net premiums earned on mortgage insurance policies and premiums assumed through our inter-segment reinsurance and capital maintenance agreement with our international mortgage insurance business;
• net investment income and net investment gains (losses) on the segment's separate investment portfolio; and
• fee revenues from contract underwriting services.
• Corporate and Other. The revenues in Corporate and Other consist primarily of:
• net premiums, insurance and investment product fees, income from non-core businesses and eliminations of inter-segment transactions; and
• unallocated net investment income and net investment gains (losses).
We allocate net investment gains (losses) from Corporate and Other to our Retirement and Protection segment using an approach based principally upon the investment portfolios established to support the segment's products and targeted capital levels. We do not allocate net investment gains (losses) from Corporate and Other to our International or U.S. Mortgage Insurance segments because they have their own separate investment portfolios, and net investment gains (losses) from those portfolios are reflected in the International and U.S. Mortgage Insurance segment results, respectively.
Our expenses consist primarily of the following:
• benefits provided to policyholders and contractholders and changes in reserves;
• interest credited on general account balances;
• acquisition and operating expenses, including commissions, marketing expenses, policy and contract servicing costs, overhead and other general expenses that are not capitalized (shown net of deferrals);
• amortization of deferred policy acquisition costs and other intangible assets;
• goodwill impairment charges;
• interest and other financing expenses; and
• income taxes.
We allocate corporate expenses to each of our operating segments using a methodology that includes allocated capital.
Business trends and conditions
Our business is, and we expect will continue to be, influenced by a number of industry-wide and product-specific trends and conditions.
General conditions and trends affecting our businesses
Financial and economic environment. As a financial security company, the stability of both the financial markets and global economies in which we operate impacts our sales and revenue growth and trends in profitability of our businesses. Global economic and financial market conditions deteriorated throughout 2008 and have continued to deteriorate in early 2009. Concerns over inflation, the availability and cost of credit, the U.S. mortgage market and a declining real estate market in the United States have contributed to increased volatility and diminished expectations for the economy and the markets going forward. These factors, combined with declining business and consumer confidence and increased unemployment, have precipitated an economic slowdown and severe recession. This has resulted in declining asset prices, lower interest rates, rating agency downgrades and increases in loan delinquency rates.
We believe that the challenging market conditions combined with slowing global economies have influenced, and will continue to influence, investment and spending decisions as both consumers and businesses adjust their risk profiles in response. This is evident in the slow down of mortgage originations and consumer lending. We have experienced, and may continue to experience, an elevated incidence of claims in our U.S. and international mortgage and lifestyle protection insurance businesses. In addition, we may experience an increase in lapses or surrenders of policies in our life and long-term care insurance businesses given our policyholders' cash needs. Other factors such as government spending, the volatility and strength of the capital markets, and inflation also affect the business and economic environment. Ultimately, we may see an adverse impact on sales, revenues and profitability trends of certain insurance and investment products.
In response to these current market conditions, we have tightened underwriting guidelines, increased pricing in targeted markets and products and reduced mortgage insurance exposures in key parts of the U.S. and Europe. We have also adjusted our asset-liability management strategy in an attempt to reduce risk during the current economic and financial market conditions. We have discontinued and may continue to discontinue offering products that no longer meet our risk and return criteria. We are also seeking to enhance our capital and liquidity as discussed under "-Liquidity and Capital Resources."
In October 2008, the EESA was enacted in response to the financial crises affecting the banking system and financial markets and continuing concern for the financial stability of investment banks and other financial institutions. Under the EESA, the U.S. Treasury has the authority to, among other things, purchase up to
$700 billion of mortgage-backed and other securities from financial institutions, as well as invest directly into certain financial institutions, for the purpose of stabilizing the financial markets. In February 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law an additional economic recovery package that is designed to further stimulate the U.S. economy through a variety of measures, including new federal spending programs designed to spur new job creation and certain federal tax cuts. The U.S. government, Federal Reserve and other governmental and regulatory bodies have taken or are considering taking a variety of other actions to address the financial crises. These include various mortgage restructuring programs under consideration or implemented by the GSEs, lenders and U.S. government. There can be no assurance as to what impact any of these actions will have on the financial markets, including the extreme levels of volatility currently being experienced. Continued volatility could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.
Volatility in credit and investment markets. Credit markets continue to experience extreme volatility resulting in reduced liquidity and widening credit spreads across asset classes associated with re-pricing of risk, as well as more credit downgrade events and increased probability of default. While these trends began mainly as a result of marketplace uncertainty arising from higher defaults in sub-prime and Alt-A residential mortgage loans, these trends have spread to other asset classes and financial sectors.
In connection with this uncertainty, we believe investors and lenders have retreated from many investments in asset-backed securities, including those associated with non-agency residential mortgage loans and commercial mortgage loans, as well as types of debt investments with weak lender protections or those with limited transparency and/or complex features which hindered investor understanding. At the same time, investors shifted emphasis towards less risky investments, increasing the demand for investments such as U.S. Treasury instruments.
As economic conditions have deteriorated, lending criteria have tightened and interbank lending has become negatively impacted, resulting in significant declines in transaction volumes across most asset classes. It is difficult to determine how long these conditions will continue or, when they do begin to improve, how long it will take for market conditions to return to historically normal levels.
These credit market conditions contributed to an increase in net unrealized investment losses since December 31, 2007 of $6.1 billion, before tax and other offsets, in our $42.9 billion investment portfolio of fixed maturity securities reflecting the conditions discussed above. As a result of the economic downturn in 2008, we have seen an increase in corporate bankruptcies, financial restructurings and the number of companies defaulting on their debt obligations and a decline in the performance of collateral underlying certain structured securities. These defaults and other performance factors resulting in declines in the value of our investment portfolio have contributed to $2.1 billion of impairments in 2008, including $815 million recorded in the fourth quarter. During 2008, in some cases, the combined shift in rating, valuations and outlook for certain securities has resulted in a change in intent of whether to hold these securities to recovery of value. As a result of the challenging market conditions and expected further weakening in the economic environment, we expect to see further volatility in the valuation of these investments, as well as the potential for additional impairments on our investment portfolio or changes regarding retention strategies for certain securities. Although these economic conditions negatively impact our investment valuation, the underlying collateral associated with assets that have not been impaired continues to perform and default rates remain at historically low levels for many of the impacted asset classes.
We also believe, however, that the current credit environment provides us with opportunities to invest in select asset classes and sectors that may enhance our investment yields over time. See "-Investments and Derivative Instruments" for additional information on our investment portfolio.
The current credit market conditions resulted in an unfavorable liquidity environment for issuers of financial instruments including commercial paper, long-term debt and certain asset-backed securities. Credit spreads widened for many corporate issuers of commercial paper and long-term debt resulting in less favorable financing
terms. This unfavorable liquidity environment impacted our ability to issue commercial paper during the second half of 2008. On October 7, 2008, the Federal Reserve Board announced details regarding the Commercial Paper Funding Facility ("CPFF"), including that it would begin funding purchases of commercial paper on October 27, 2008. The CPFF was intended to improve liquidity in short-term funding markets and, thereby, increase the availability of credit for businesses and households. In October 2008, we were approved and participated in the CPFF. However, as a result of the downgrade of our holding company, we subsequently became ineligible to sell commercial paper to the facility. The outstanding commercial paper was held by CPFF until maturity and was fully repaid in February 2009.
See additional trends related to volatile credit markets in "-Trends and conditions affecting our segments."
Trends and conditions affecting our segments
Retirement and Protection
Wealth management. Results of our wealth management business are impacted by demand for asset management products and related support services, investment performance and equity market fluctuations. Growth in the asset management industry has slowed in the current market environment. The volatility in the equity markets has negatively impacted our assets under management, net flows, the performance of certain mutual funds we offer and associated fee income. If the current market conditions continue, we expect to see further negative performance in these areas.
Retirement income. Results for our retirement income business are affected by investment performance, interest rate levels, slope of the interest rate yield curve, net interest spreads, equity market fluctuations, mortality, policyholder lapses and new product sales. Our competitive position within many of our distribution channels and our ability to retain business depends on many factors, including product features, ratings and competitive strength. We strive to maintain a competitive position by providing product features such as current and minimum crediting rates on spread-based products relative to our competitors, surrender charge periods in our annuities, as well as guaranteed benefit features we offer in variable annuity products that provide a guaranteed death or living benefit to the consumer while enabling us to actively manage our risk exposure.
Over the past several years, we have seen a decline in defined benefit retirement plans in favor of defined contribution plans with more of the responsibility for retirement planning shifting to the individual. We believe this trend supports long-term demand for individual and group retirement income products that provide various forms of guaranteed benefits with the opportunity to realize upside market performance.
During the second half of 2008, we experienced lower variable annuity sales as a result of consumers seeking safety from recent market turbulence and uncertainty. In addition, although we experienced higher fixed annuity sales in the third quarter of 2008 and the beginning of the fourth quarter 2008, we started to see a decline in fixed annuity sales during December 2008. Due to recent adverse market conditions, our results and ratings downgrades, certain firms have elected to suspend sales of fixed and variable annuity products issued by one or more of our subsidiaries. In addition, we have scaled back certain product features and reduced sales personnel supporting certain product lines due to the adverse market conditions and future risk, profitability and capital considerations. Such suspensions and company actions may have a material impact on our ability to generate new sales in these product lines. Current market pressures are also increasing our expected claim costs, the costs and effectiveness of our hedging programs and the level of capital we may need to support these products.
We believe there may be further declines in equity markets and increased equity market volatility which will continue to negatively impact the costs and effectiveness of our hedging programs. Additionally, the significant declines and increased volatility in the equity markets have negatively impacted our results during the second half of 2008 through accelerated DAC amortization and increased reserves. Market volatility has continued into
early 2009. Continued equity market volatility could result in additional losses in our variable annuity products and associated hedging program which will negatively impact our results of operations.
In response to the declines in equity markets, we will continue offering annuity products with living benefit features, such as those described above; however, certain product features will be scaled back to reduce risk. We do not believe that this will impact our competitive position as we believe these benefits will still be attractive to the consumer within our target markets.
Institutional. Results in our institutional business are affected by credit markets. Our ability to issue funding agreements, FABNs and GICs to institutional investors is primarily dependent upon the credit markets, market perception of credit and risk-based pricing and our credit rating and credit default swap levels. As a result of market turmoil and investors' need for higher yields, credit quality and/or greater liquidity, we have seen reduced sales across these product lines. We do not anticipate writing new institutional business in the current market environment.
Life insurance. Results in our life insurance business are impacted by sales, mortality, persistency, investment yields and statutory reserve requirements. Additionally, sales of our products and persistency of our insurance in-force are dependent on competitive product features and pricing, distributor and customer service. As a result of a competitive pricing environment and our discipline to achieve targeted returns, we experienced lower term life insurance sales. We anticipate this trend will continue as we maintain our pricing discipline and focus on middle market term life insurance sales. We also experienced lower persistency in term life insurance policies going into their post-level rate period (10 and 15 years after policy issue). We expect these trends to continue, in general, as we maintain pricing discipline in the current competitive pricing environment.
We have also experienced a shift in focus by our distributors from term life insurance to universal life insurance products. In response to this shift in focus by our distributors, we have built out our universal life insurance capabilities with an emphasis on middle market consumers.
Regulations XXX and AXXX require insurers to establish additional statutory reserves for term life insurance policies with long-term premium guarantees and certain universal life insurance policies with secondary guarantees, which increase the capital required to write these products. For term life and certain universal life insurance, we have implemented capital management actions, including the use of securitization transactions, to reduce the capital impact of these regulations. Several competitors have taken capital management actions similar to ours in response to Regulations XXX and AXXX. Recent market conditions adversely affected the availability of securitization transactions and created the need for us to pursue alternative approaches such as reinsurance and private financing transactions and we expect these conditions to continue. If we are unable to continue to implement these actions, we may be required to increase statutory reserves, incur higher operating costs than we currently anticipate, reduce our sales of these products or pursue alternative approaches, such as additional reinsurance and private financing transactions. We also may have to implement measures that may be disruptive to our business. For example, because term and universal life insurance are particularly price-sensitive products, any increase in premiums charged on these products in order to compensate us for the increased statutory reserve requirements or higher costs of reinsurance may result in a significant loss of volume and adversely affect our life insurance operations.
Long-term care insurance. Results of our long-term care insurance business are influenced by morbidity, persistency, investment yields, new product sales, expenses and reinsurance. In recent years, industry-wide first-year annualized premiums of individual long-term care insurance have either declined or grown moderately. Our sales growth over the past year reflects the breadth of our distribution and progress across multiple growth initiatives with an emphasis on broadening our product offerings. For example, we continued to experience sales growth in our Medicare supplement insurance and have expanded our product offerings to include linked-benefits products. The impact of lower termination rates, in particular lapse rates, on older issued policies, some with expiring reinsurance coverage, are causing higher benefits and other changes in policy reserves, resulting in
lower net operating income for older blocks of business. In addition, the continued low interest rate environment may negatively impact our net operating income. In response to these trends, we intend to continue to pursue multiple growth initiatives, continue investing in case management improvements, maintain tight expense management, actively explore reinsurance and capital market solutions, execute investment strategies and, if appropriate, consider other actions to improve profitability of the overall block. During 2007 and 2008, we filed for state regulatory approvals for premium rate increases of between 8% and 12% on most of our block of older issued long-term care insurance policies and are currently in the process of implementing these rate increases. The rate increase has now been approved in 43 states.
International
International mortgage insurance. Results of our international mortgage insurance business are affected by changes in regulatory environments, employment and other economic and housing market trends, including interest rate trends, home price appreciation, mortgage origination volume, levels of mortgage delinquencies and movements in foreign currency exchange rates. We have seen a slowdown in mortgage origination and home price appreciation levels in Canada and Australia. In addition, in many European countries, we have seen significant declines in housing markets. For example, we believe the increase in unemployment and the deteriorating economic environment in Spain, Ireland and the U.K. have resulted in home price declines, as well as lower mortgage insurance origination volume. Other international housing markets are experiencing similar developments as economic conditions worsen. As a result of these economic trends and slowing mortgage origination volume, we anticipate declining levels of new insurance written, which will adversely impact the growth of our revenues.
Canada and Australia comprise approximately 95% of our international mortgage insurance risk in-force with an estimated average effective loan-to-value ratio of 64% as of December 31, 2008. In these markets, our international mortgage insurance business has expanded with favorable operating results; however, we expect higher loss levels as recent books of insurance in-force season in a period of higher unemployment and low or declining home price appreciation. High-risk lending practices such as sub-prime and 100% loan-to-value lending are far less common in international markets than in the United States, and there is significantly less reliance on capital market funding for liquidity needs. We have also taken steps to tighten our underwriting requirements, increase prices in targeted areas or products and improve loss mitigation strategies in light of the slowing housing markets. We expect that our established international mortgage insurance business in Canada and Australia will contribute the majority of total revenues and profits of this business. As global economies continue to . . .
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