Banks' first-quarter income from the sale and servicing of mutual funds and annuities grew 2.9% from a year earlier, to $1.43 billion, according to the Michael White-Symetra Bank Fee Income Report.
Bank annuity commissions and fees rose 18.6%, to $263.5 million, the report said on Monday.
Compiled by Michael White Associates LLC and sponsored by Symetra Financial, the report measures and benchmarks banks' performance in generating fee income from insurance, securities brokerage, and annuity and mutual fund sales. It is based on data from all 7,663 commercial and FDIC-supervised savings banks operating at the end of the first quarter.
Despite the year-over-year growth, banks' first-quarter mutual fund and annuity fee income was down 2.4% from the previous quarter.
So far this year, 1,638, or 21.4% of all banks in the sample, engaged in mutual fund and annuity sales and servicing, a share more than two percentage points less than the year earlier.
About 12% of the banks reported all of the $263.5 million in earnings from annuity sales, and the latter category accounted for 18.4% of the quarter's mutual fund and annuity income.
