MetLife is no longer a bank holding company.
MetLife is a company with their head office in New York and a lot of affiliates in the United States, Japan, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.
This company used to do insurance business as well as some other non-core businesses including a bank one, since 2001. In 2011 it made the first attempt to concentrate on insurance business only and parted most of its non-core resources. Though, it didn’t stop its banking activity then.
But, after a world financial crisis, the situation became extremely tough, so MetLife was subject to special "stress test" which had been aimed to make a kind of forecast of MetLife’s banking activity in future. As a result, the company failed that test and the heads decided to break up their banking business completely and continue to sell only insurance products and services. In January, they sold out all their bank deposits.
Their decision was approved both by Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the board of governors of the Federal Reserve.
Now, the company is trying to save their rates with the help of derivatives. In spite of high derivative losses, the fourth-quarter results of the company were reported to be higher than they had been expected to be. Specialists connect such an unexpected result with high net investment, premiums and fees.
We believe that these factors create a stressful growth scenario and pose direct risk to the operating and competitive leverage of MetLife,
state the analytics by Zacks Investment Research.