RJ and Makay

The sixth annual release of Millward Brown’s 2011 top 100 worldwide brands provides insights into worldwide financial institution and insurance company brand rankings. Banks excelled at utilizing digital channels for transactional needs such as online banking, but lagged in brand-building social media applications.

Investment banks struggled with post-crisis reputation and trustworthy issues. While customers continued to engage with small local banks for checking and other transactional services, they generally kept their savings in large institutions viewed as “too big to fail.”

Midsize variable annuity (VA) writers like John Hancock, Lincoln, and Transamerica should give the big boys — Prudential, MetLife, and Jackson National — a run for their money in this year's race for VA market share. Competition is heating up as new VA filings are prepped for May, the month most insurers give updated prospectuses to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“On balance, the variable annuities market is getting right back into the features arms race from 2004 to 2007,” says Randy Binner, senior vice president and senior analyst with FBR Capital Markets Corp. His report, “2011 Channel Checks: VA, Life, Indexed Annuity Outlooks Positive, Fixed Annuity and LTC Outlooks Weak,” was released last week.

Financial professionals might be interested in an InvestmentNews report about a poll by Advisors Trusted Advisor, which recently uncovered some surprising trends in the financial advice industry. Of the 262 advisors polled, more than half were at fee-only firms, a quarter worked as independent reps, and the rest were employed by wirehouses, brokerages, banks or insurers. Survey participants had a median of about $400 million in assets under management.

Here are the seven trends the poll revealed, in descending order, just as described by InvestmentNews: