IUL Products Are Getting Quietly Better — Most Brokers Are Sleeping On It

The IUL landscape has changed more in the last 18 months than in the previous five years combined. Carriers are rolling out uncapped strategies, improved multiplier bonuses, and more competitive cap rates — and the majority of the broker market is still selling the same products they pitched in 2022.

Here's what I'm seeing from the carrier side at Catalyst Financial Group: the spread between the best and worst IUL products on the market has never been wider. If you're still defaulting to the same two or three carriers without running updated illustrations, you're leaving real value on the table for your clients.

The biggest shift? Participation rate structures. Several carriers have moved to hybrid indexing strategies that give clients exposure to uncapped S&P performance with a modest spread. That's a fundamentally different value proposition than the old cap-rate model, and it changes the entire conversation around cash value accumulation.

The brokers who are winning right now aren't the ones with the biggest books — they're the ones who actually read the product updates. In a commoditized industry, product knowledge is the last real moat.