The US Department of Labor (DOL) proposal promoting new “best interest” standards that provide protections primarily to individual and small business investors related to retirement accounts and annuities could affect US individual annuity sales, according to Fitch Ratings.

The proposal—whose final version was made public Wednesday—is viewed as “credit neutral” to US life insurers, Fitch said. The ratings agency expects the bulk of the final DOL regulations will remain largely as proposed, with some more minor changes in procedure likely.

But Fitch said the new regulations “could have a material negative impact on the sale of certain annuity products, drive changes in product offerings, distribution strategies and compensation structures and lead to increased operational costs to comply with the new standard,” a Fitch release said.

[Fitch released its report a few days before the publication of the final version of the fiduciary rule this week. In the original version, it assumed that indexed annuities would have an advantage over variable annuities. But in the final rule, sellers of variable and indexed annuities were required to use the BICE.]