Meiji Yasuda agreed to buy Legal & General America, the parent of Banner Life and William Penn, from the UK's Legal & General for $2.3 billion in cash. Meiji Yasuda takes full ownership of the U.S. term life protection business and a 20% economic interest in the U.S. pension risk transfer business, with L&G keeping 80% through reinsurance. The two insurers also formed a long-term partnership, and Meiji Yasuda planned to build a roughly 5% stake in L&G. The deal The agreement was announced on February 7, 2025. L&G put the equity value at £1.8 billion ($2.3 billion), payable in cash at completion. Meiji Yasuda's own figure for the acquisition cost was about $2.28 billion (about ¥352.2 billion at the time), and the insurer said it would fund the purchase entirely from cash on hand. Under the pension risk transfer arrangement, L&G keeps 80% of existing and new U.S. PRT business through reinsurance and set aside £400 million to fund it. The two companies also agreed that L&G would manage the investments backing the U.S. PRT and protection books. Linklaters advised Meiji Yasuda. About Legal & General America Legal & General America writes L&G's U.S. term life and PRT business through Banner Life and William Penn. The U.S. protection unit booked gross premiums of £1.27 billion in 2023, up from £1.22 billion in 2022, and wrote $175 million of new business premium in 2023. L&G expected it to produce about $90 million of operating profit in 2024, up from $34 million in 2023. Strategy For L&G, the sale was part of a plan to focus on core businesses. It said the deal would lift its Solvency II ratio by 22 percentage points at completion, and that it would follow up with an extra £1 billion share buyback, part of a goal to return about 40% of its market value to shareholders between 2025 and 2027. For Meiji Yasuda, the deal adds an individual term life platform to its group-focused U.S. business. It bought StanCorp Financial Group in 2016 for about ¥620 billion, at the time the largest overseas acquisition by a Japanese life insurer, and in 2024 StanCorp agreed to buy American Heritage Life, Allstate's group insurance subsidiary. Approvals and timeline The parties first expected completion toward the end of 2025. The deal closed on February 2, 2026, after approvals from supervisory authorities in each relevant country, and Meiji Yasuda took its roughly 5% shareholding in L&G alongside the purchase.
