GERMANY – German life insurer Allianz Leben has seen its new premiums from corporate pension business rise almost 37% to 850.6 million euros.

“The increasing significance of company pension provision is reflected in the increased level of new premiums from corporate business: it jumped by 36.7% to 850.6 million euros,” Allianz Lebensversicherungs said in a statement. The figure compares to 622.0 million euros a year ago.

Munich-based Allianz Leben is the life arm of German financial services firm Allianz.

“The first year for the pension scheme was extremely successful,” it said. “New premium income reached 113.2 million euros.”

“This amount was generated by more than 13,000 group contracts with companies and 160,000 contracts with employees.”

“Around 20,000 employees either had company pension provision set up from scratch or expanded existing schemes.” It said the “drivers” of growth were not just large firms but small and medium sized companies as well.

As for industry-wide schemes, it said that as at the end of 2002, that contracts had been concluded with around 3,500 companies through MetallRente, the pension institution of the metalworking and electrical industry. Allianz is consortium leader for this pension institution.

And it had had concluded around 598,000 Riester personal pension contracts by the close of 2002, which it says gives it around a 20% market share in this business, named after labour minister Walter Riester. It said it had “greater expectations” for the business.

“If you look at the market as a whole, there’s no doubt we’re in a good position – but overall, too few people have taken up the Riester pension so far”, said management board chairman Gerhard Rupprecht, though he said it was “early days” to judge the success of Riester products.

Overall it posted a 29.9% rise in new premiums, taking its tally to 2.6 billion euros from 2.0 billion euros in 2001.

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