In the last twelve months alone, numerous bancassurance collaborations have been announced.
We see interesting potential in some of these partnerships. For example:
- In Italy, Assimoco, a subsidiary of the German R+V Versicherung, and the cooperative Cassa Centrale Banca have announced an exclusive sales partnership, initially limited to five years. The joint objective is to offer life and non-life insurance products through the bank's sales organization.
- In Switzerland, Zurich and Cembra Bank have signed a cooperation agreement. Accordingly, the two partners want to meet a customer need and also offer Zurich insurance to the leasing and financing customers of Cembra's 4,000 partner garages.
- Swiss Re subsidiary iptiQ and Spanish digital bank WiZink plan to jointly develop and offer a broad range of life, non-life and health insurance products for the Spanish and Portuguese markets.
- IptiQ and UBS launched an integrated bancassurance product for mortgage clients last summer.
- The Munich Re subsidiary Ergo and the bank Santander Deutschland will be selling products from the cooperation partner from 2022. In 2021, they have already jointly launched a credit card with additional insurance benefits.
We see that players are not only entering into new collaborations in traditional bancassurance markets such as Italy or Spain. They are also increasingly active in markets that were previously not considered particularly bancassurance-friendly, such as Germany or Switzerland.
The diverse types of bancassurance services are also striking. These range from the traditional distribution of insurance products by a bank (Assimoco-Cassa Centrale Banca) to the co-creation of products (Ergo-Santander) to the digital distribution of a rich selection of insurance products (iptiQ-WiZink).
We consider the fact that numerous significant cooperations have been announced within just one year to be particularly noteworthy. The term bancassurance seems to be experiencing a revival instead of a requiem. In our opinion, we are witnessing the beginning of a trend that forward-looking institutions cannot afford to miss.
