LV= has seen its group operating profit for 2014 decrease to £86m, down from £105m in 2013.
Profit before tax fell to £37m in the period to 31 December 2014 compared to £156m in 2013. LV= attributed this to "less favourable short-term investment fluctuations."
LV also saw customer numbers increase to 5.7m during 2014.
LV='s annual results for protection revealed an 11% increase in new business contributions which now stand at £217m.
The new business contribution (before investment in new proposition) for protection was £10m, an increase of £4m compared to 2013.
The entire life and pensions sector of LV= saw a decrease in underlying profit from £29m in 2013 to £17m in 2014 due to lower business volumes and profit contribution from LV='s enhanced annuity business.
During 2014 LV launched its Personal Sick Pay income protection product and agreed the takeover of the majority of Teachers Assurance.
Richard Rowney, life and protection managing director at LV=, said: "We've been growing protection for a while now, year on year for the last five years or so.
"We're pretty used to being a growth business in protection it's a pretty self-contained operation that we run out of Exeter, we've recruited and grown and recruited to deal with those increasing protection volumes.
Myles Rix, protection managing director at LV=, said: "Personal Sick pay has certainly been a successful product but when we look across our other lines of business we're seeing growth in nearly all the other lines as well so it's certainly not down to one product."
He added: "We've got a couple of very minor lines of business, so we've got a mortgage protection line that's a small variant of our income protection, but in aggregate all our income protection is up.
"What we've seen is across the spectrum of propositions that we've got we can meet intermediaries' requirements,
"Whether it's looking for customers that are served by the new personal sick pay product, the traditionally harder to insure more manual working or the more conventional full income propositions it's the breadth of the product that's served us well."
