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On September 2, Equitable Holdings (NYSE:EQH) added the industry’s first bitcoin-linked investment option to a registered index-linked annuity, a striking move for products built around downside protection rather than crypto speculation. The new SCS Premier option tracks the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (NASDAQ:IBIT), giving retirement savers a way into bitcoin’s swings without going all in. It is a bet that even conservative annuity buyers want a taste of crypto, as long as some of the risk is fenced off.
Crypto Meets the Retirement Account
Equitable has been here before. The company says it pioneered the first index-linked annuity back in 2010, and the SCS Premier expansion continues that pattern of moving first as investor tastes shift. The bitcoin option comes with one-year segments offering buffers of 10%, 15%, 20% and 40%, and allocations are generally capped at 25% of contract value, so clients get defined protection rather than open-ended exposure. Steve Scanlon, Equitable’s Head of Individual Retirement, framed the launch as answering investors who are curious about bitcoin but wary of its volatility. The same update added Optimal Mix Segments, which spread money across multiple indices and weight the best performers at maturity, plus Dual Direction Downside Advantage segments that can turn a decline within the buffer into a gain worth twice the size of that drop.
That product push sits on top of a business that is already growing. In the second quarter of 2026, Equitable posted net inflows of $1.7 billion in Retirement, $2.0 billion in Wealth Management and $0.8 billion in Asset Management, pushing total assets under management and administration to a record $1.2 trillion, up 10% from a year earlier. The company also returned $449 million to shareholders in the quarter and says it remains on track for a 60% to 70% payout ratio in 2026. Layered on top of that is the pending merger with Corebridge Financial, which shareholders approved on July 30, and which management expects will add more than 10% to earnings per share on a run-rate basis by year-end 2028.
The Losses Underneath the Growth
The headline numbers hide a rockier bottom line. Equitable reported a GAAP net loss of $453 million, or $1.68 per share, for the second quarter of 2026, even as non-GAAP operating earnings came in positive at $488 million. Book value per common share was negative $6.79 once accumulated other comprehensive income is included, and only turns positive, to $30.92, when the company’s stake in AllianceBernstein is marked at fair value instead of book value. That gap shows how much the balance sheet still depends on interest rate marks and how the AB stake happens to be valued, rather than on cash results alone.
Source: finance.yahoo.com