While many U.S. corporate defined benefit plan sponsors have frozen their plans to benefit accruals or transferred their liabilities to insurance companies, they still represent hundreds of billions of dollars of investible assets and reports of their demise are premature, experts say.

It was 10 years ago in June that General Motors Co. stunned the institutional investing industry when the automaker announced a $29 billion pension buyout deal with Prudential Insurance Co. of America.

The event seemingly portended seismic implications for the U.S. corporate defined benefit plan landscape, which had already experienced well over a decade of plans closing and freezing benefit accruals. It was by far the largest such transaction completed in the U.S. and remains so, and it initiated a growing, decadelong trend of purchasing annuities to transfer pension liabilities.

The significance of the trend was reiterated in September when International Business Machines Corp., Armonk, N.Y., purchased group annuity contracts from Prudential and Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. to transfer a total of $16 billion in U.S. defined benefit plan liabilities. It was the largest buyout since the GM deal and was the second largest of all time.

IBM spokesman Timothy F. Davidson said the company had nothing to add to what’s been publicly disclosed in a Sept. 13 8-K filing with the SEC.

According to data from research firm LIMRA, since the beginning of 2013, U.S. corporate DB plans transferred a total of $191.6 billion in liabilities to insurance companies through June 30 of this year, and the September IBM deal brings that total to over $200 billion through Sept. 30.

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