The insurer is promoting asset management and financial planning for private individuals – in branches. According to insurance experts, despite digitization, direct contact with an advisor is still very important.
The headquarters of the insurer Swiss Life in the sunlight on June 28, 2012 in Zurich.
Swiss Life now offers private individuals wealth management and advisory services in the areas of financial planning, taxes and retirement. To this end, the insurer is opening a branch in Zurich, which is to be followed by others in various Swiss regions.
With Swiss Life Wealth Managers, the Group’s subsidiary in Switzerland, the insurer is targeting the so-called affluent market segment. Depending on the definition, these are people with assets of between CHF 250,000 and CHF 1 million.
“A clearly growing segment”
According to Swiss Life spokeswoman Julie Albisser, the aim is to offer customers financial planning and asset management from a single source. This is where the concept of the new offer differs from that in other Swiss Life branches. The first call is free, after that the fees are calculated based on the cost of the consultation. After the branch on Tödistrasse in Zurich, the insurer will open another branch in Winterthur in the course of the year.
Martin Eling, professor at the University of St. Gallen, sees affluent customers as “a very attractive and also clearly growing segment”. Florian Schreiber, a professor at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, also considers Swiss Life’s approach to be “very exciting”. It offers the opportunity to cover the needs of a customer group that is important for the insurer with a new and additional offer.
According to a statement, the new offer is part of the “Swiss Life 2024” strategy program. With this, the insurer wants to expand the managed assets of private customers in the home market of Switzerland to more than 6.5 billion francs by 2024.
No new gap in the market
Wealth management, also known as private wealth management, is considered the domain of banks. As Eling explains, this is also a field that life insurers are working on worldwide. For Swiss Life, this is not a completely new niche in the market, but rather an area that the company has been working on for a relatively long time – “but now with increased intensity”.
Wealth management is a very attractive topic, “because there are still margins here that the classic life insurance business may not be able to offer at the moment”. While term life insurance is still quite profitable in Switzerland, traditional endowment life insurance has been under a lot of pressure for a number of years, Eling continues. “Of course, you then look to the right and left along the value chain to see what other fields could be in which you can generate margins with the right skills.”
No end of general agency
While many banks have closed branches in recent years, Swiss Life is now opening new ones. The insurer announced in February that it would open 100 new branches in Germany this year.
According to the insurance study by the Institute for Financial Services Zug for 2021, customers will increasingly want modern forms of advice such as video calls or walk-in advice desks in the future. “Regardless of this, the ‘classic general agency’, together with one’s own living room, is still and will continue to be the preferred place for advice for customers,” says Schreiber. The data showed that customers perceive this offer as more reliable and accommodating – with direct insurers, on the other hand, there is a lack of personal customer contact. The latter can rather score with their low prices and faster processes.
“On this basis, it can be concluded that branches are important despite the changed customer behavior and will remain so in the longer term,” says Schreiber. Pension advice and financial planning are bigger things that cannot be done quickly with a digital assistant. The key to success is likely to lie in a hybrid approach that reconciles customers’ digital and physical touchpoints.