Monetary Policy and Life Insurance Profitability: Bancassurance’s Edge in a Low-Yield World
Pablo Aguilar-Perez
Pablo Aguilar-Perez
- We show how the low-yield era of the 2010s shaped the behavior and profitability of non-bank financial intermediaries, identifying an income channel through which monetary policy transmits to life insurers.
- We demonstrate that monetary easing raises profitability, but its effect depends critically on the guaranteed yield spread: insurers relying on large margins between portfolio returns and guaranteed rates are significantly more exposed.
- We uncover strong business-model heterogeneity: bancassurers reprice liabilities faster, sustain higher premium growth, and benefit from more diversified portfolios, giving them a structural advantage in low-yield environments.
This paper examines the effects of monetary policy on the profitability of life insurers during the prolonged low-interestrate period, leveraging a novel dataset of 31 leading French insurers from 2009 to 2018. Following supervisory practice and business-model criteria, we classify firms into bancassurers (insurance subsidiaries of banking groups) and non-bancassurers (the rest of life insurers governed by the French Insurance Code). Our central contribution is to document the income channel for life insurance. Monetary policy easing boosts profitability, but the adverse effect of the low-yield era operates through the spread between portfolio returns and credited (guaranteed) rates: as this guaranteed-yield spread widens, the gain from easing attenuates. We show that this mechanism differs materially across business models. Bancassurers reduce credited rates more rapidly than peers while maintaining above-average premium growth, thereby dampening the income channel’s drag and sustaining margins. Portfolio choices reinforce this advantage: bancassurers’ profitability increases with higher equity shares, in contrast to nonbancassurers, consistent with more diversified portfolios that smooth returns. Taken together, the results reveal pronounced heterogeneity in how life insurers adapt to monetary easing and underscore the importance of business model for the transmission of monetary policy to non-bank financial intermediaries.
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