ALLIANZ INSURANCE LANKA
Q: What are the Allianz brand’s strengths?
A: Allianz is among the most highly valued financial service providers in the world – globally, it is among the top five life and health insurers. The company is a leading global provider of staff benefits with an employee base exceeding 142,000 serving 86 million customers in over 80 countries.
Allianz has gained a wealth of experience in multiple areas including implementing and executing pension solutions globally in its 128 years in insurance, and its Asia-Pacific presence since 1910. This enables us to work with clients to form long-term partnerships to build tailored and innovative solutions.
Q: How is Allianz Insurance Lanka addressing the needs of corporates?
A: The future and pensions are discussion topics among many people in Sri Lanka and around the world. Discussion revolves around important aspects such as the sustainability of their lifestyles in the future. Against this backdrop, we’ve introduced Allianz Corporate Pension to address the needs of employers and employees alike.
While pension plans are offered on an individual basis by insurance firms in Sri Lanka, the Allianz Corporate Pension scheme is a comprehensive plan designed to support corporates’ real needs – it incorporates our global brand’s expertise.
As these plans are tailor-made for corporates, there are numerous options offering flexibility to suit employers’ needs. For instance, it provides the ability to define the amount contributed towards the premium on their part and by employees.
Sustainability is important when discussing pensions because these plans can continue for 30-40 years. There should be an assurance for employers and employees that the company providing such policies is financially strong and stable to fulfil its promises.
This is an assurance that Allianz can proudly provide since it has graced the global insurance market for over a century and been ranked as the most sustainable insurer in the world by Dow Jones Sustainability Index for two consecutive years since 2017.
Q: How is this scheme different from other products?
A: It’s not merely a pension scheme but can be coupled with life insurance, critical illness, accidental benefits and other optional covers.
We invested in a state-of-the-art administration system – designed specifically for group pension administration – that facilitates all these features and enables us to offer a unique proposition to corporates. This will ensure that Allianz provides hassle free administration support to corporate customers.
Q: And why are such plans important?
A: There are three scenarios that people cannot prevent: ageing, serious illness and untimely death. As an insurance provider, our role is to encourage people to prepare for such scenarios and ensure that they and their loved ones are provided for in any situation especially if the unforeseen occurs.
Q: How does the plan benefit employers and employees?
A: For employers, it serves as a retention and motivation tool – they can choose to allow personnel to remain in their employment for longer periods and even continue their pension plans after serving a predefined time with the organisation. The latter is an option offered to employers to better manage human resources.
Additionally, it can help attract new talent as a unique feature in a benefits package.
It’s also a form of social responsibility as employers can encourage staff to save for their retirement. A premium payment option that employers can select is contributing a percentage of an employee’s contribution. In other words, the amount can be shared between employers and employees or either can contribute 100 percent. The employer’s contribution could also be classified as a staff welfare expense and be exempted from taxes.
For employees, the product’s group nature means that they benefit from lower insurance premiums than when approaching insurance firms as individuals. In addition, they will avoid hidden fees. The amount they’d gain is likely to be higher compared to individual pension products.
Allianz also guarantees that premiums paid by employers and employees will be the minimum payout at maturity as we don’t place all the investment risk on the employee. This means that the money in a pension account at any given point in time is guaranteed at retirement.
Currently, we’re developing a mobile app to enable employees to track the fund’s growth and the amount contributed along with the crediting rate we declare.
Q: And what are the retirement benefits?
A: For the post-retirement phase of the model, we offer three options starting with the default option, which is a tax-free one-off cash payment.
The other options are post-retirement products and there are many. One is a monthly pension over a fixed period of time or for a lifetime. Alternatively, policyholders can choose to keep their money at Allianz and withdraw it whenever they want as with a bank account.
Following the conclusion of Allianz Corporate Pension’s corporate phase, we guarantee that we’ll continue to provide our full range of services to individual customers even in retirement.
