Practice research November 2026
Half your clients arrive with money in motion and nothing decided
For marketing organizations and carriers: seven findings and ten practices for the producers you support.
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Half of all clients arrive with money already in motion and no decision made about where it goes. That is the largest single fact in this dataset, it holds at every age, and almost nothing in the standard sales process is built for it.
This research reads two bodies of evidence against each other. 6,313 structured client cases and roughly 34,000 messages that producers exchanged with an AI copilot show what a producer writes down. 60 recorded conversations between producers and their clients show what the client says. Where the two disagree, the disagreement is the finding.
Data from November 2025 to August 2026 · 6,313 client cases · 60 client conversations · How we did this research
A client calls an annuity producer. In half of all cases they have already moved money out of a retirement account and have no idea what to do with it. They have not narrowed it to two carriers. They have chosen nothing.
What they want to talk about is a retirement. Social Security comes up in 77% of recorded calls, more often than the surrender terms of the contract being discussed. A monthly income figure comes up in 81%. Taxes in 69%. Their children in 56%. On the calls where the transcript identifies each speaker, it is the producer who introduces inflation, the market crash, the bank-CD comparison and the lock-up question. The client arrives talking about a retirement date, a number they need each month, and their family.
One subject the client raises more often than the producer: a spouse. 86% of clients mention one. 80% of case records have no spouse on file. Households where a spouse is recorded are the largest cases in the book at a $300,000 median, and the intake form leaves the joint-income question blank 92% of the time.
What stalls the decision is comprehension. 27% of clients say plainly that they do not understand what they are being shown; 8% object to fees. Not one client in 60 argued that an annuity duplicates Social Security, which is the objection the industry rehearses hardest against.
Meanwhile a tenth of the book is a client deciding for the second time, shopping a contract they already own — work that appears in 592 cases while the 1035-exchange field records 203. And the clients sitting closest to a decision are the ones almost nobody prospects: the over-80 client moves twice as much money as the under-50 client and already knows what the product does.
Producers respond to all of this by asking for a better illustration. 53% of copilot requests are for an illustration or proposal; 10% ask for an explanation. The single most-discussed contract feature is the premium bonus, in roughly one case in four.
The market has plenty of illustrations. What it lacks is a way to decide.
49% of all 6,313 cases are logged with the client's goal as “help deciding.” Money is moving and no direction has been chosen.
The number barely moves with age. It runs between 51% and 58% in every band from under-50 to over-80, a spread of seven points across a thirty-year range. Indecision holds steady as retirement arrives, so few of these clients resolve it on their own given more time.
Part of the explanation is how they got here. 19% of clients on recorded calls name an advertisement as the only reason they are looking at all. A fifth of this market did not go searching. It was found, and it arrived without a vocabulary.
What is striking is that these clients are perfectly clear about the problem. Asked what they are worried about, 56% name losing principal in a market fall, usually with a year and a figure attached. 31% say they have no income plan at all. 29% name outliving their savings.
They are equally clear about what they want.
Guaranteed income for life and protected growth arrive together, at 68% and 66%, and clients describe both in the language of insurance rather than investing. Peace of mind is named directly, unprompted, by 58% — ahead of tax deferral and well ahead of leaving money to heirs.
So the goal is settled. They know what frightens them and they know what they want it to feel like. The open question is which route gets them there, which calls for judgement more than information.
So yeah, it's definitely a process, uh, trying to figure out everything, and then you don't know what you don't know.
Client quote · a federal employee moving TSP money, with a rental property and a 529 for his daughter
And I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to figure that out in my head if it, if it, if it makes sense.
Client quote · a client weighing a five-year contract
Half a market in this state is the market itself. The producer who supplies the framework usually earns the right to recommend what goes in it.
Social Security comes up more often than getting at the money.
Social Security comes up in more than three-quarters of recorded calls, ahead of the surrender terms of the product under discussion. A specific monthly income figure appears in 81%. Taxes in 69%. A prior advisor or brokerage, named by the client, in 54%. Pensions in 48%, rental income in 44%, bank CDs in 31%.
None of that is a product question. The client is assembling a picture of their retirement out loud, and the annuity is one instrument on a table that already holds a pension, a property and a savings account.
But all that kind of scares me, because my Social Security will be taxed.
Client quote · 66, planning income with his wife
It is possible to go one step further. On 14 of these calls the transcript identifies every speaker, so we can count not only what came up but who raised it.
A spouse — the only subject clients raise more often.
Inflation is raised by the producer in nine of the fourteen calls and by the client in two. Bank CDs and cash: producer eleven, client five. A past market loss: producer seven, client three. Getting at the money: producer six, client two.
The fear-and-alternatives frame that organises most annuity marketing is, in this sample, largely introduced by the person selling. The clearest case is a single word.
Producers use it 66 times across these calls and in 13 of the 14. Clients use it 15 times and in 5. It is professional vocabulary, roughly four to one, and it is worth knowing that the word carrying most of the industry's value proposition is largely one side of the conversation talking to itself.
When clients do raise the mechanics, they do it plainly and late.
Are there any fees, uh, some kind of surrender fees when I take it out after five years or no?
Client quote · asking, unprompted, about a five-year contract
Fourteen calls is a small base, and these figures are reported as counts for that reason. The direction is consistent enough to act on; the magnitude remains open.
You know, I want, I want to make sure I protect my wife for when I'm gone and things like that.
Client quote · 65, with a wife of 66, and a past market loss of over a million dollars
Of the seventeen subjects counted on the speaker-labelled calls, exactly one comes up more often from the client's side than the producer's. Clients name a spouse in six of fourteen calls. Producers name one in three.
86% of clients mention a spouse on a call. 80% of case records have no spouse on file. The joint-income question is left blank on 92% of intake questionnaires, and where a spouse is recorded, joint income is the preference 38% of the time.
This is the most valuable gap in the dataset. Households with a spouse on the record carry a median premium of $300,000, higher than any other way of cutting this book. And of the clients who mention a spouse, fewer than half have that spouse on the call, so the person holding the veto has usually heard none of the reasoning.
In three of the seven calls where a client mentioned a spouse, the producer's side of the call contains no joint, survivor or spousal language at all. Three of seven is a count on a small sample and should be read as a lead worth checking. But the record shows the same shape at full scale.
“Are we planning for just you, or for both of you?”
The client has usually already opened the door.
The objection that stops an undecided client is rarely the one producers prepare for.
It duplicates Social Security: not one client raised it.
Comprehension leads at 27% of conversations. Fees come fourth at 8%. Doubt about the producer's motives, at 10%, also outranks price. And the argument the industry rehearses hardest against — that an annuity merely duplicates Social Security — was raised by nobody at all.
That 27% sounds like this:
...my document tab where you can go and review the contract to digest all those details, which I don't understand now.
Client quote · still working, reviewing a contract on his own
A combination of mutual funds, stocks, S&P, whatever that is, whatever my financial advisor is doing, which is actually doing pretty good right now, actually.
Client quote · describing what he currently owns
That second quote is the more revealing one. He is describing his own existing portfolio, and he cannot name what is in it. This is the person who has been in the market for decades and still cannot say what he holds. Comprehension visibly breaks down somewhere in 38% of recorded calls.
Read against Section 1, the two findings compound. Half the market has no framework, a quarter of clients say they cannot follow what they are shown, and the standard response is a clearer illustration of the same thing.
Some of the undecided have decided before, and are unhappy enough to do it again.
Producer notes discuss replacing an existing contract in 592 cases. The structured 1035-exchange field is ticked on 203. Replacement runs at roughly three times what the paperwork records, which means a process treating it as an edge case is wrong about one case in ten.
Among clients who completed full financial suitability paperwork, 43% already hold a fixed annuity. For close to half of that group this is a second contract.
Yeah, the one I have through Fidelity, they want a 7% surrender fee, and it doesn't matter if you're one, two, or three, it's 7%.
Client quote · already owns an annuity and is shopping to replace it
He is deciding whether the new thing beats the old thing, which is a harder conversation than a first purchase and needs three things: a like-for-like income comparison, a full accounting of the surrender charge and rider value given up, and a stated threshold below which switching fails to pay for itself. Telling him to stay put, when that is the answer, is the most credible thing a producer can do here.
Age tells you almost nothing about the size of a case.
The median holds near $200,000 from age 50 all the way past 80. Only the under-50 band differs, at half that. Average client age sits between 60 and 65 in every band of case size, from under $100,000 to over $1 million, so the money and the stated goal carry the information that age does not.
Clients under 60 are 26% of the book, at the lowest amounts in it. Clients over 80 are 5%, and they move the same $200,000 as everyone else.
The over-80 client arrives further along. Immediate income annuities come up in 16% of those cases against 2% of under-50 cases. Multi-year fixed annuities in 21% against 4%. Death benefit and legacy language in 26% against 5%. These are clients who already know what the instrument does and are choosing between structures.
Growth is the stated goal in 27% of over-80 cases, matching the under-50s and exceeding every band in between. The 80-year-old who only wants income is a smaller part of that segment than most producers would guess.
The segment is small and will not fill a pipeline on its own. Per case it is worth double the under-50 client, it decides faster, and the work is immediate income, rate shopping, 1035 exchanges and legacy structuring.
53% of cases contain a request to build an illustration or a proposal. 10% contain a request to explain a mechanic. The tool is used five times more often to produce output than to think about a case, in a market where half the clients have chosen nothing and a quarter cannot follow the material.
What producers do write about divides cleanly into two kinds of thing: the product the money would go into, and the features attached to it. They are counted separately here, because a bonus-bearing indexed annuity belongs in both and ranking them on one axis would double-count it.
Fixed indexed annuities dominate the product side at 28.5% of cases, with everything variable or registered index-linked under 2%. On the feature side the premium bonus leads at 23.6%, roughly one case in four, and more than twice the rate of the lifetime income rider.
Both figures come from the same universe: 2,277 client cases containing free-typed producer messages, out of a 2,465-case export. The bonus figure is stated after stripping product names, because roughly a fifth of the raw matches are titles like Ascent Pro 10 Bonus rather than a client's stated interest in one. On the full production database the equivalent client-level rate is 22% for any bonus mention and closer to 16% once product names are removed.
Read section by section this looks like a list of habits to correct. Read together it is narrower, and more fixable.
Every gap here runs the same direction. The producer raises inflation, the crash, the CD comparison and the surrender schedule, because those are the arguments a product is sold with. The client raises a retirement date, a monthly figure, a spouse and their children, because those are the reasons they came. The producer asks the copilot for an illustration, because an illustration is the thing the process is built to produce. And the client, in half of all cases, has not yet decided anything an illustration could help with.
The decision is the product, ahead of the contract and ahead of the illustration of it.
Half of this market is paying for judgement about what to do with money that is already in motion, and the producer who supplies that judgement is the one who gets to write the case. Every section of this research arrives at the same place from a different direction. The scarce work is helping somebody decide.
Two honest limits sit on that conclusion.
Every one of these is drawn from a finding above, and each carries the number it rests on.
Say it plainly: “Are we planning for just you, or for both of you?”
The evidence 86% of clients mention a spouse; 80% of case records have none on file. Households with a spouse recorded are the largest cases in the book, at a $300,000 median.
Ask what they need each month and when it has to start, before anything else is discussed.
The evidence A specific monthly figure comes up in 81% of recorded calls. Cases with income as the stated goal run a $250,000 median against $200,000 for the book.
Have a neutral, plain-language account of the three real options for a rollover balance, usable before you recommend anything.
The evidence 49% of all cases are logged with the client's goal as “help deciding,” flat at every age from under-50 to over-80.
Write a 90-second explanation of index crediting, of income base against account value, and of the surrender schedule. Say each aloud until it survives an interruption.
The evidence Comprehension is the top objection at 27%; fees are fourth at 8%. Producers ask for an illustration in 53% of cases and for an explanation in 10%.
Social Security, taxes and children are what they came to discuss. The market crash and the inflation argument are what you came to discuss.
The evidence Social Security comes up in 77% of calls, taxes in 69%, children in 56%. On calls where speakers are identified, the producer raises inflation in 9 of 14 and the client in 2.
One sentence, early, unprompted.
The evidence Fees or commission come up in 52% of calls. Doubt about the producer's motives is a coded objection in 10%, ahead of price.
Treat an existing contract as likely rather than exceptional.
The evidence 43% of clients who completed full suitability paperwork already hold a fixed annuity.
State the threshold out loud before you run the comparison.
The evidence Producer notes discuss replacing a contract in 592 cases; the 1035 field records 203. Roughly one case in ten is a replacement, and an honest no is what earns the next conversation.
Compare net of fee and net of bonus across the full surrender period, not the headline percentage.
The evidence The premium bonus is the most-discussed contract feature, appearing in 23.6% of cases with free-typed producer messages, more than twice the rate of the lifetime income rider.
Keep an immediate-income carrier and a rate-competitive fixed annuity on the shelf for them.
The evidence Clients over 80 move a $200,000 median against $100,000 for the under-50 client. Immediate income annuities come up in 16% of their cases against 2%.
The scarce work is helping somebody decide
This research was produced by Annuities Genius, which makes the producer platform the case data comes from.
All figures cover November 2025 through August 2026 and come from two independent sources.
6,313 structured client cases created by producers on Annuities Genius, each beginning with a questionnaire completed with the client, together with roughly 34,000 producer messages exchanged with the AI copilot. Product and feature shares are counted on free-typed producer messages only, across the 2,277 cases carrying them within a 2,465-case export; canned prompts, machine payloads and compliance checklists are excluded, and product names are stripped before feature keywords are matched. Medians use the same export. Subject-frequency figures across the wider case base use the 5,874 cases carrying producer text.
60 recorded calls and chat intakes between producers and their clients, each read in full and coded independently by two reviewers. Subject-frequency figures use 48 of these files. The who-raised-it analysis uses the 14 in which the transcript identifies each speaker.
Sample sizes range from 6,313 to 14 across this report, and the language reflects it: a finding drawn from 6,313 cases is stated as fact, and one drawn from 14 calls is reported as a count with the direction it points. Case types, objections and call subjects are multi-coded, so shares add to more than 100%. A product or feature mention measures what a producer wrote down, never what a client bought. The recorded conversations skew later-stage than the average case, with 68% actively comparing options against 49% logged as undecided in the records, so they indicate direction rather than magnitude. All clients are anonymised and described only by the circumstances they volunteered.
Founder and Chairman, Annuities Genius
David Novak founded Annuities Genius and chairs the company. He is a licensed insurance agent and writes the LinkedIn newsletter Become an Annuities Genius.
Annuities Genius helps annuity producers choose the right product for each client and show it in a report with their name on it. Annuities Genius is a service of Agatha Global Tech, LLC.
Annuities Genius. The Deciding Half. Practice research, November 2026. https://annuitiesgenius.com/deciding-half
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