FIA Sales Leaders, 2015 to 2025: 11 Years of LIMRA Data

How Athene overtook Allianz atop the FIA market

Go back to 2015 and Allianz Life was the undisputed leader in fixed index annuity sales, while Athene sat at #6. Eleven years later, that order has completely flipped, and understanding how it flipped is close to the whole story of where the FIA market stands today.

At the industry level, the growth looks steady: according to LIMRA's U.S. Individual Annuity Sales data, the category booked $54.5 billion in premium in 2015, and by 2025 that number had grown 135% to reach $127.9 billion. Underneath that top-line number, one carrier grew far faster than the market around it. Over that identical stretch, Athene's own yearly FIA sales grew roughly six-fold, starting near $2.4 billion and finishing at $15.0 billion, in a market that only a little more than doubled. Allianz Life, by comparison, held steady in the $8.7 billion to $10.2 billion range for five years, dropped to $5.0 billion during the disrupted 2020 sales cycle, and has ranked #2 in every year since.

The engine behind that shift was ownership. Apollo Global Management, a New York-based alternative asset manager, spent roughly a decade rebuilding Athene's investment portfolio around private credit, structured debt and other higher-yielding assets, then used the resulting spread to offer more competitive crediting through independent distribution. By 2025, three of the five biggest FIA sellers sat under private equity or alternative-asset ownership in some form, a structural shift that reshaped a category a legacy mutual insurer once dominated almost entirely on its own.

Total industry sales versus the field

Looking at total industry FIA sales alongside the combined sales of the 20 largest carriers each year shows two clear inflection points. Sales fell to $55.5 billion in 2020, the low point of the entire dataset, as the pandemic disrupted in-person annuity sales. Then 2024 delivered the sharpest single-year jump in the dataset, as rising interest rates finally made FIA crediting rates competitive with bonds and CDs after more than a decade of near-zero rates.

Across all 11 years, the 20 largest carriers have represented a remarkably stable roughly 85% of total industry sales, meaning the long tail of smaller and regional carriers has held onto about 15% of the market the entire time, even as the specific carriers occupying the top ranks changed dramatically.

How an Iowa-based insurer rewired the FIA market

Athene is headquartered in West Des Moines, Iowa, which is a detail worth pausing on only because Iowa is not where you would expect to find the balance sheet that reshaped U.S. retirement income sales. That was the point from the start.

Jim Belardi, a former AIG executive, founded Athene in 2009 with Apollo Global Management's backing. The idea was direct: regulators and industry convention had long pushed traditional life insurers toward heavy allocations of investment-grade corporate bonds, paper that, in the years after the 2008 financial crisis, carried thin yields. Apollo's expertise was in higher-yielding alternative credit. Build an insurer whose general account resembled Apollo's investment book more than a conventional mutual insurer's, and you could pay policyholders meaningfully better crediting rates while still keeping a healthy spread for the company. Apollo co-founder and CEO Marc Rowan has continued making this case publicly as the strategy scaled.

The company spent its first decade building a foundation. A 2013 deal brought Aviva USA's American annuity book under the Athene name, handing it a sizable block of in-force policies plus the distribution relationships that came with them, and Athene went public three years later. By 2019, the carrier sat at #2 in FIA sales, still trailing only Allianz. January 2022 brought a full merger between the two companies, folding Athene in as a wholly owned Apollo subsidiary and pushing the balance-sheet integration even further. Every year since 2020, Athene has finished #1.

The wider industry's breakout year was 2024, when sales hit $126.9 billion, up 32% from $95.9 billion in 2023, with roughly three-quarters of the top 20 carriers posting double-digit growth. Rising rates, market volatility and an aging population looking for principal protection with some upside all lined up at once, and the carriers with the broadest independent distribution and the sharpest crediting captured the largest share of that demand. Apollo-backed Athene had both.

What the sales trend charts show

Looking only at the five largest 2025 carriers, Athene and Allianz separate clearly from the pack, while the gap between those two leaders and the third through fifth spots is smaller. That kind of separation is what a market rewarding scale over everything else tends to look like once you chart it out.

Narrowing the view to the carriers affiliated with private equity or alternative asset managers, the growth acceleration between 2019 and 2022 lines up almost exactly across Athene, Corebridge (still reported as AIG Companies for part of that window), F&G, Global Atlantic and Delaware Life. That is not a coincidence: five insurers built on a similar general-account model responded to the same favorable rate environment in roughly the same way. The mutual carriers in the dataset did not show a comparable acceleration, largely because they could not deploy capital that quickly.

Tracking individual carriers over time also makes the 2020 rank flip easy to see: Athene's sales line crosses above Allianz's that year and never falls back below it.

The Athene and Allianz rivalry, year by year

Across the dataset's opening stretch, from 2015 through 2019, Allianz Life held an undisputed lead in FIA sales, posting between $8.7 billion and $10.2 billion every year. Within the industry, the FIA label and the Allianz brand were treated as nearly one and the same, and for years running, no single contract sold more than the Allianz 222. Allianz was also the carrier everyone else borrowed from, having built volatility-controlled proprietary indices roughly half a decade before any serious rival caught up.

That head start funded the distribution reach that kept Allianz at #1 for so long. Athene, watching from #6 in 2015, absorbed the lesson: much of the index design and rider structure that today's private-equity-backed carriers ship can be traced back to ideas Allianz introduced first.

Athene's own climb through the 2010s was steady rather than sudden: #6 in 2015 at $2.4 billion, then #2 in 2016 at $4.5 billion once the 2013 Aviva USA deal started paying off. It held a top-three spot through 2019 without cracking #1.

2020 changed that. Even with the pandemic dragging industry-wide sales down to just $55.5 billion, the weakest showing anywhere in this dataset, Athene managed to edge ahead of Allianz for the first time, $5.8 billion against $5.0 billion. The reason was not complicated: in-person sales meetings largely disappeared that year, but Apollo's balance sheet kept throwing off enough spread income for Athene to keep its crediting competitive regardless. Allianz's distribution ran heavier through wirehouses and broker-dealers, a channel that struggled far more once face-to-face meetings stopped.

Athene extended the lead to $7.7 billion in 2021, and by 2025 the gap had widened to $15.0 billion versus Allianz's $11.7 billion, a $3.3 billion difference that reflects how much faster Apollo-backed capital can scale. Allianz, for its part, has never dropped below #2 in this entire dataset, and the product pipeline it built during its dominant years still shapes what competitors ship today. Take Athene's newer Aviator 5 contract: it offers an index lock and lets you choose joint or single income when you activate the rider, both ideas Allianz had already rolled out years earlier. Both companies' underlying models work; different buyers simply respond to different strengths.

Who is actually running these companies

Behind the balance sheet strategy and the sales figures are a handful of specific companies and the people who built them.

Athene and Apollo

Headquartered in West Des Moines, Iowa and founded in 2009, Athene is the clearest proof point for Apollo's broader argument: that investment-grade bonds no longer generate enough yield to fund competitive annuity rates, and that an insurance balance sheet built to hold private credit at scale is the fix. Marc Rowan, who co-founded Apollo and now serves as its CEO, has been one of the more outspoken defenders of that approach anywhere in financial services. Jim Belardi founded and ran Athene on his own from 2009 up until the 2022 merger, and he has stayed on to lead it under Apollo.

Allianz Life of North America

Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Allianz Life is the U.S. subsidiary of Allianz SE, the German insurance group that employs roughly 157,000 people across 70 countries. The U.S. company operates independently of its European parent financially and operationally: an Allianz Life annuity contract sits with the U.S. subsidiary, and its obligations are backed by reserves held domestically. Its flagship remains the Allianz 222, with the newer Benefit Control+ and 222+ contracts sitting alongside it, both adding fresh crediting strategies and index choices in 2025.

Corebridge Financial

Corebridge, headquartered in Houston, Texas, is the life insurance and retirement business AIG spun off in 2022. AIG itself was a consistent top-five FIA carrier through 2020, at times ranking as high as #2. After the 2022 separation and public listing, Brookfield Reinsurance later took a majority stake in the renamed company. If your contract was originally written by AIG before that split, Corebridge now handles the servicing, though nothing about the underlying terms has changed. Corebridge reached #3 in the 2025 rankings at $10.0 billion.

American Equity Investment Life

Also based in West Des Moines, Iowa, American Equity spent most of this dataset as the category's legacy independent specialist, built specifically around distributing FIAs through independent marketing organizations. It held a top-six spot every year from 2015 through 2024. Brookfield Reinsurance acquired the company in 2024 in a $4.3 billion deal, folding it into the Brookfield Wealth Solutions platform. With that deal closed, three of 2025's five biggest sellers, Athene, Corebridge and American Equity, all trace back to an alternative-asset manager in some fashion.

Private equity's growing footprint at the top

By 2025, three of the five biggest sellers, Athene, Corebridge and American Equity, sat under private equity or alternative-asset ownership. Allianz and Sammons Financial Companies, the parent of Midland National and North American, remain the two large non-PE names still competing at that level. F&G lands just below that group, at #6.

The mechanism behind this shift is fairly direct. PE-affiliated insurers build their general accounts around alternative credit, private loans and middle-market direct lending that tend to yield more than the investment-grade corporate bonds most traditional insurers hold. That gets passed through to policyholders in three visible ways: bigger S&P 500 caps, better terms on uncapped index strategies, and stronger roll-up rates baked into income riders. Independent agents notice this, and so do the IMOs that aggregate them.

What is genuinely unusual is how far Athene's dominance extends: the carrier was also the top seller of multi-year guaranteed annuities in 2025. Topping the fixed index rankings while simultaneously leading multi-year guaranteed annuity sales, using the same balance sheet approach, is a combination no other carrier in this dataset has pulled off.

Regulators have been watching this shift too. As far back as December 2021, Retirement Income Journal's Kerry Pechter was already writing about the edge that private-equity-owned annuity issuers had built into their model. The NAIC followed with its own standing review of PE-owned insurers starting in June 2022, when it adopted a package of 13 considerations aimed at affiliated reinsurance arrangements, harder-to-value assets, and how much capital these companies hold against their risk.

For a buyer, the useful question is not whether private equity ownership is inherently good or bad. It is whether a specific carrier's financial strength ratings hold up and whether its current product terms are competitive. AM Best currently rates Athene, Corebridge, American Equity and Global Atlantic in the A range, with F&G there as well, and every one of these contracts remains a general account obligation backed by the issuing carrier's full balance sheet plus your state's guaranty association coverage up to that state's limit.

Reading the 2025 top five

The 2025 numbers confirm a leadership structure that has been building since 2020. Athene sits on top at $15.0 billion, with Allianz's $11.7 billion and then Corebridge's $10.0 billion behind it. On a consolidated basis, Sammons Financial Companies posted roughly $9.5 billion, and American Equity closes out the group at $7.2 billion. Whoever ranks sixth trails all five of these names by a wide margin.

Just below that cluster, Nationwide is the standout non-PE story at $6.1 billion, a traditional mutual insurer that has kept its footing through solid broker-dealer relationships and a strong income rider lineup. A tier further down, MassMutual Ascend, the renamed Great American Life, sits alongside Pacific Life and Security Benefit, each holding a respectable spot built around a specific product angle rather than simply winning on rate.

Ranks 11 through 20 shuffle constantly. Carriers there typically separate by no more than $200 million to $500 million in yearly sales, a gap tight enough that one new product launch or one new distribution partnership can reshuffle three or four positions for a carrier within a single year.

What the rank history shows over time

Looking at who has held the top three spots across the full 11 years, the same three names show up again and again: Allianz, Athene, and AIG, which later became Corebridge. Between 2015 and 2020, one of those three occupied every single top-three slot, just in a different order each year. What shifted starting in 2021 was not the identity of the leaders but the size of the gap between them and everyone else. Fewer carriers outside the top four turned in top-tier results by 2024 and 2025 than at any earlier point in the dataset, evidence that the market has kept concentrating at the very top.

Carriers that dropped out of the top 20

A handful of once-prominent FIA sellers are gone from these rankings today, either folded into a bigger company or simply crowded out of the top 20 entirely.

• AIG Companies, now Corebridge Financial. AIG ranked among the top five FIA sellers every year through 2020, reaching #3 with $4.5 billion at one point, before being renamed Corebridge Financial in 2022 and taken public. It now holds #3 with $10.0 billion under the new name.
• Great American Life. Sat at #3 in 2015 with $3.7 billion and held a top-ten spot through 2021, until MassMutual bought it that year for $3.5 billion. The business now operates as MassMutual Ascend.
• Jackson National. Hit #7 in 2019 at $3.7 billion, then shifted its focus toward variable annuities and RILAs once it went public in 2021, falling out of the FIA top 20 by 2022.
• Brighthouse Financial. Reached #7 in 2017 at $2.5 billion not long after spinning off from MetLife, then leaned hard into RILAs and dropped out of the FIA top 20 by 2018.
• Voya Financial. Placed #12 in 2015, slipped to #14 by 2017, then sold its individual annuity line to Venerable Holdings in 2018 and has not shown up in FIA rankings since.
• Forethought Annuity. Sat at #13 in 2015 with $1.5 billion before Global Atlantic bought it in 2016 and folded it into its own book of business.

Five things to keep in mind if you are shopping for an FIA

This history is genuinely useful context, but if you are actually weighing a fixed index annuity purchase, here is what matters most from it.

• How much a carrier sells says nothing about fit. The right FIA for your situation is the one whose surrender schedule, crediting method and riders match your plan, whether or not it happens to be a top seller.
• A rating in the A range is not the whole picture. Each of 2025's top-five carriers earns a strong grade from AM Best, but what differs is what actually backs that grade, alternative credit at the PE-backed names versus investment-grade bonds at Allianz.
• Cap rates alone tell you very little. Have a licensed strategist run both contracts against real historical index results over a 5 to 10 year stretch before you compare what looks best on paper today.
• Know who actually services your policy now. Forethought is now part of Global Atlantic, AIG-issued contracts are serviced by Corebridge, Great American policies now run through MassMutual Ascend, and American Equity now operates under Brookfield. Your original contract terms do not change, but who answers the phone does.
• The top five looks settled; the rest of the top 20 is not. A newer, PE-affiliated carrier is not automatically a weaker choice, but a shorter operating history is a good reason to dig deeper into financial strength and reserve structure before you commit.

Private equity capital, not the legacy mutual insurers, has been the defining force reshaping FIA sales over this stretch. Where Allianz once held the category almost uncontested, Apollo-backed Athene and a second wave of alternative-asset-affiliated carriers, including Corebridge, F&G, Global Atlantic, Delaware Life and now American Equity, have rewritten the top of the leaderboard. The carriers winning the most business today generally combine alternative-credit balance sheets with wide independent distribution. Whether that combination is right for you depends entirely on what you need from a contract, and on doing the homework a sales ranking alone cannot do for you.

Where this data comes from

Every sales figure and ranking on this page traces back to LIMRA's U.S. Individual Annuity Sales releases for 2015 through 2025. Carriers report these numbers to LIMRA directly under confidentiality terms, and the resulting dataset is thought to cover somewhere around 92% of all U.S. annuity sales activity, which makes it the closest thing available to a complete public picture. Altogether it spans 11 years and roughly 220 carrier-year records, enough to reconstruct every top-20 finish across the period; industry totals include FIA sales reported to LIMRA by carriers of every size, not only those that cracked the top 20, and each year's market share gets calculated against that year's full total.

A number of carriers changed their name or their owner somewhere along the way. Where the same balance sheet, the same distribution network and largely the same lineup of products carried through a rename or an acquisition, this page treats the renamed entity as a continuation of the original carrier rather than a brand-new one: that covers AIG's 2022 rebrand into Corebridge Financial, Athene's 2013 acquisition of Aviva USA, Forethought Annuity's 2016 absorption into Global Atlantic, and American Equity's 2024 move under Brookfield.

LIMRA also revises earlier years from time to time once slow-reporting carriers catch up with updated submissions, so the numbers here reflect the latest published version available as of this page's most recent update. Any future revision is likely to be small, on the order of 1% to 3% for a given year, and unlikely to reorder which carriers sit at the top.