Brookfield Wealth profit doubles to $1.25bn
Brookfield Wealth Solutions will use its recently purchased annuity and life insurance businesses in North America as a springboard for international expansion, its chief executive officer said.
Brookfield Wealth – formerly Brookfield Re – said its annual profit jumped 56% to $1.25 billion in 2024 as the life and property casualty re/insurer’s takeover spree began to pay off.
Fourth quarter net income rose 27% from $453 million to $576 million.
“Our strong results for 2024 underscore our growth over the past year having doubled the size of the business in that time,” said Sachin Shah (pictured), CEO of Brookfield Wealth Solutions. “Our scalable North American annuity platform, coupled with our leading investment capabilities, will serve as the foundation for our business as we expand internationally in 2025.”
Brookfield Wealth said the improvement in net income was driven by its acquisition of American Equity Investment Life (AEL) during the year as well as higher net investment income resulting from moving assets into higher yielding investment strategies.
Brookfield Wealth also owns life re/insurer American National and property casualty re/insurer Argo.
Shah’s reference to international expansion comes after there have been widespread reports that the company plans to expand into the UK pension and annuity sector. In November it completed a $1.1 billion funded reinsurance transaction with Just Group as part of a pension risk transfer with a UK pension fund.
In the course of the year, the company said it generated $14 billion of retail annuity sales and $5 billion of pension risk transfer deals.
“Today, we are in a strong liquidity position, with approximately $31 billion of cash and short-term liquid investments across our investment portfolios, and another $21 billion of long-term liquid investments,” management said.
“These liquid assets will support the ongoing rotation of our portfolio into higher yielding investment strategies, while ensuring we have sufficient liquidity coverage for our liabilities in the case of any stress events impacting the broader market.”
Net premium and policy revenue rose to $9.05 billion from $4.55 billion while bet investment income jumped to $4.44 billion from $2.12 billion. Net investment gains rose from $241 million to $615 million.
Benefits and claims paid on insurance profits more than doubled to $8.16 billion from $3.94 billion while operating expenses increased to $1.36 billion from $777 million.
Did you get value from this story? Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories like this sent straight to your inbox.
