Christmas after Christmas? This is the impression that many savers must have felt when discovering, at the start of the year, the first announcements of 2023 performance of funds in euros: + 2.75% at Milleis Vie (rate revealed in mid-2023). December 2023), + 3% at BNP Paribas Cardif, + 2.80% at GMF Vie and MAAF Vie, + 2.70% at Macif, + 3.05% at MIF or even + 3.50% for mutual Garance, + 3.70% for La France Mutualiste…
By boosting the yield of their offers by 50 to 100 basis points on average, life insurers seem to have given themselves the word to restore the image of funds in euros, much tarnished by a decade of falling bond rates (between 2012 and 2021, the rate of the ten-year Treasury bond, the sector benchmark, fell from 2.5% to 0%).
The objective is twofold: to fight against the steamroller of Livret A (+26.7 billion euros in net collection, compared to −25.4 billion euros for funds in euros over the first eleven months of the year last), and attract new money likely to be invested in assets significantly more profitable than those which were injected into the portfolios of companies until 2021.
Will savers respond to the call? “The euro fund remains the fundamental basis of life insurance, and those who wanted to bury it too quickly are biting their fingers”, judge Hervé Tisserand, president of the broker Fapes Diffusion. However, some precautions in interpreting the yields displayed are necessary before fully adhering to the idea of the return of the security-yield martingale of these supports, which still represent more than two thirds of life insurance stocks (1,324 .4 billion euros at the end of 2022).
Inflation still high
First of all, it is worth remembering that, compared to declining but still high annual inflation (3.7% in 2023, compared to 5.2% in 2022), the real profitability of most funds in euros remains negative. Expected, according to the estimates of the independent expert Cyrille Chartier-Kastler, founder of the Good Value for Money site, “between 2.50% and 2.70%” for the entire market (compared to 1.9% in 2022), the average return net of inflation on euro funds is still stagnating below −1%. This, before deduction of costs on payment and social security contributions of 17.2%.
Another point: savers faced, as Cyrille Chartier-Kastler points out, with a “increasing dispersion of rates served generated by highly differentiated commercial policies” must detail the performances displayed. The vast majority of insurers have in fact clearly chosen in recent years to give pride of place to unit-linked (UC) support with unguaranteed capital (40% of new payments), by increasing funds in euros when investments are diversified.
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