"Allianz Popular bundles insurance and banking expertise"

Vicente Tardio: The new holding, Allianz Popular, reinforces our 20 year old alliance with Banco Popular in the life insurance and pension businesses. It will bundle together the existing joint ventures - the life insurance provider Eurovida and the pension plan company Europensiones - with the Asset Management section of Banco Popular, Popular Gestion.

Through its wide distribution network in Spain, Banco Popular will exclusively, and on a long-term basis, distribute Allianz Popular's products, including life insurance, pension plans and asset management, as well as the property and casualty products of Allianz Seguros.

What are the advantages for Allianz and Banco Popular? 

Tardio: The new agreement gives both partners strong incentives to further develop and grow the insurance, pension and asset management business in Spain. It strengthens our distribution capabilities in the Spanish market and will help solidify our position as one of the leading insurance companies.

What are the advantages for customers?

Tardio: In 2,000 branches of Banco Popular in Spain, 6.3 million customers will benefit from a wide range of excellent products and services that will help them to protect their assets and their future.

One concrete example is that Spain is one of the markets with a higher impact of aging population and this will lead to new needs regarding pension provision (accumulation phase) and also pensioners' financial planning ("de-cumulation"). To fulfil these needs, customers will count on strong partners who can be trusted for their knowledge and solvency. This is exactly what Allianz and Banco Popular offers.

What is Allianz's strategy in Spain?

Tardio: Spain has always been an important core market for Allianz in Europe. With our successful brokers and agents channels, we have delivered superior services to our customers and a growth rate above the market average. This is reflected in the development of the number of customers and contracts during the last years.

In direct insurance, we were pioneers on the market with our local subsidiary Fénix Directo. The bancassurance channel, now secured for the long-term, is an additional possibility to interact with customers.

In a nutshell, I would say that to keep our momentum of profitable growth, we need to be customer oriented and this means offering several kinds of products and channels to our customers, all over Spain, through 11,000 agents and brokers, 2,000 bank branches, the internet and telephone. Customers needs are variable, but the choices are always theirs.