Sanofi, Legal & General Complete $1.74B Annuity Buy-In

The plan’s second transaction with L&G kicks off 2025, which could be another record year for pension risk transfer volume.



Legal & General Assurance Society Ltd.
announced Tuesday that the insurer had completed a 1.4-billion-pound ($1.74 billion) annuity buy-in transaction with the Sanofi Pension Scheme, the pharmaceutical company’s U.K. defined benefit plan.

The transaction, the scheme’s second with L&G, will cover the benefits of 4,900 retirees and 5,600 deferred members. The companies completed a 760-million-pound partial buy-in in 2021. With this transaction, all beneficiaries of the plan are now insured through Legal & General.

The pension fund’s sponsoring employer is Aventis Pharma Ltd., part of Sanofi S.A., a French multinational pharmaceutical and health care company.

The Sanofi pension has been a longtime client of L&G, according to a news release: The insurer’s asset management division has managed plan assets since 1999.

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Last year was a record year for pension risk transfer transaction volume. Most estimates put U.K. PRT volume at about 40 billion pounds, a figure that could be met or exceeded in 2025, as an increasing number of plans offload liabilities to insurers.

Pension consultant Lane Clark & Peacock expects 40 billion to 50 billion pounds of annuity buy-in transactions to occur this year for the third year in a row. LCP also expects more than 300 such transactions for the first time. Legal & General predicts 50 billion to 65 billion pounds of PRT volume annually from 2024 to 2028.

Legal & General completed 10.5 billion pounds of PRT transactions last year, according to the firm’s institutional retirement deep dive. That included four transactions worth more than one billion pounds each that closed in the second half of the year. L&G also noted that in 2024, the firm recorded its highest PRT volumes in Canada and the U.S.

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