MassMutual Ascend tops $2 billion in RIA annuity sales as advisors warm to income products

MassMutual Ascend, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mass Mutual wth a focus on the RIA channel, is celebrating a milestone in the growing adoption of advisory annuities.

MassMutual Ascend has crossed $2 billion in lifetime advisory annuity sales, a threshold the insurer says reflects a broader shift in how registered investment advisors think about guaranteed income inside client portfolios.

The Cincinnati-based insurer said the figure was built on relationships with more than 1,700 investment advisor representatives across nearly 1,000 RIAs that now write annuity business through the platform. What stands out in the numbers, the company said, is the pace of adoption in the past two years, with roughly $900 million of its advisory annuity sales coming through the door in 2025 and 2026.

"Ten years ago, we entered this space with the belief that annuities would become an increasingly important part of advisors' retirement planning conversations," Joe Maringer, senior vice president and national sales manager at MassMutual Ascend, said in a statement. "This milestone is evidence of that momentum."

MassMutual Ascend traces the milestone back to 2016, when it launched what it describes as the industry's first advisory fixed-indexed annuity – a product built specifically for advisors operating under a fee-based, rather than commission-based, model.

Since then, the company has broadened its advisory lineup to include fixed, fixed-indexed and registered index-linked annuities, chasing a fiduciary channel that has historically been resistant to insurance products.

Read more: New annuity products don't have 'icky feeling of commission'

MassMutual Ascend has also been ranked by LIMRA as the top provider in advisory fixed-indexed annuity sales for eight consecutive quarters, the company said.

The case for annuities inside a fee-based practice rests on the fact that a dollar allocated to an annuity can be structured to generate more guaranteed lifetime income than a dollar in a comparable fixed-income allocation; that comes down mostly to how risk pooling happens across a large group of policyholders. Mammoth asset managers like BlackRock and State Street have taken notice over the past few years, placing annuities into the target-date products that end up on the menus made available to countless retirement plan participants.

“When these asset managers are acknowledging that fact and bringing annuities in for income and in their own products, that has to speak to the individual advisors and firms who think they can do it themselves," David Lau, founder and CEO of DPL Financial, previously told InvestmentNews.

Belle Bielawska, national key account manager at MassMutual Ascend, framed the trend as a shift in how advisors and clients view the category altogether.

"As retirement challenges become more complex, we're seeing greater appreciation for the role modern annuities can play and the unique outcomes they’re designed to deliver, like defined protection and contractual income, which can be difficult to replicate elsewhere," Bielawska said in a written statement.

Despite the RIA channel's prospects as the next growth frontier for annuities, there are still real challenges holding them back. Aside from implementaton bottlenecks and the historical gap in fee-based options, the complexity of annuties has also kept a lid on how comfortable advisors can get recommending them. For fiduciary advisors, it may also be easier to justify other low-cost options when considering their clients' best interest. 

Matt Clifford, a former Pacific Life annuities strategy leader who now consults for insurance and annuity organizations, also sees a mismatch between how carriers design and roll out new annuity products, and how RIAs approach planning for clients.

"Carriers frequently adjust product design and sales capacity to align with shifting economic conditions, capital markets, and internal risk or return objectives," Clifford said in a LinkedIn note. "Over the past two decades, this has driven notable shifts in product focus."

Read more: Annuity sales hit a record as war and Fed jitters redraw fixed income

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, he said low interest rates and rampant market volatility, along with more stringent capital reserve requirements for financial institutions, pushed carriers to pivot from variable annuities with guaranteed living benefits to more capital-efficient fixed products.

"As interest rates rose sharply in 2022 and 2023, carriers leaned into multi-year guaranteed annuities (MYGAs) and fixed indexed annuities (FIAs), which offered competitive yields, strong consumer appeal, and more favorable spread economics," he said. "These shifts, while operationally sound, create downstream friction as advisors and wholesalers must reorient their positioning, retrain, and reshape client conversations."

While firms operating in the brokerage model may be able to manage those frictions thanks to incentives such as commssions and marketing support, Clfford argued those buttons aren't available to RIAs, who "tend to take a longer-term, more stable view of portfolio construction and client strategy.

"To close that gap, carriers should work to identify and deeply understand the core financial planning principles RIAs manage to, and build a set of stable, fitting solutions that align with those principles," he said. "Just as important, they must demonstrate a willingness to stand behind those solutions across changing macro and market environments."