Living Time to launch new retirement income product

Living Time is to launch a new product in the retirement income space in the next couple of months that will “move the whole market forward”.

Kim Lerche-Thomsen, chief executive officer of Living Time, said, “I have been known in the past for innovation and I want to continue this.”

When questioned as to whether the product will be another fixed term annuity offering. Lerche-Thomsen said that there are four main players in that market now and when Living Time comes back to market it would “like to do something different”.

“When I invented the fixed term annuity product it was a leap forward in the market, but I think that there is a lot more that can be done,” he added.

The company added that it will look at the lifetime annuity market and see if it can improve it and offer a better product for consumers.

Living Time is relaunching its brand at the end of January and said that the launch of the new product will come “in the next couple of months”.

However, Lerche-Thomsen said that Living Time will continue to champion the cause of the Open Market Option (OMO), as part of a wider industry move.

MetLife took on sole distribution of Living Time’s fixed term annuity product in January last year after taking over Alico, which underwrites Living Time’s plans.

MetLife said that the move would allow it to enter the flexible annuity space and that Living Time would remain an independent company.

In September of last year, MetLife replaced the product it was distributing with the Freedom Income Plan, which allows retirees to switch early from the fixed term annuity to an enhanced or lifetime annuity.

At the time Living Time said that it was not the end for the brand and it would develop products either alongside MetLife or separately.

Since then it has been working on promoting the OMO campaign, most recently turning its attention to manufacturers improving internal shopping around processes. The campaign is aiming to link up with three manufacturers to draft a new set of standards for the industry.

Living Time created the first fixed term annuity at the start of 2008, with four providers now making up the market. LV= followed with a launch in 2010, followed by a raft last year.

Just Retirement launched a fixed-term annuity in followed by Aviva in June and MetLife’s new offering in September.

laura.suter@ft.com