Irish Life chief Declan Bolger sees business as a marathon, not a sprint

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Irish Life chief Declan Bolger sees business as a marathon, not a sprint via IrishTimesBiz

With 1.5 million customers, the 83-year-old group has a relationship with almost one in three people in Ireland, three in five workers in the State, and 27 of the top 30 overseas multinationals with operations in the Republic, according to Bolger.

‘I came back to Ireland and joined Canada Life with a plan to save money to go to South America. But I’m still here’ After holding a number of senior positions in the product development, finance and actuarial areas of Canada Life Europe — focused on Germany — he became the unit’s chief executive in 2009.

It brings total payouts to €996.4 million — or more than three-quarters of the €1.3 billion price Great-West Lifeco paid for the group in 2013 as the State sought to recover some of the €4 billion bailout of the assurer’s former sister company, Permanent TSB.The latest dividends came as the life and pensions subsidiary of the group, Irish Life Assurance, reported a €167 million net profit last year, while the figure for Irish Life Health amounted to €30.9 million.

“Obviously, markets are down, so that’s impacting fee income. But offsetting that, sales are very strong. Persistency remains very strong across both corporates and retail customers, just as it did through Covid,” he says. Persistency relates to customers paying timely premiums on policies. The rate at which Great-West Lifeco has been recouping its investment comes even as it has backed Irish Life in a flurry of deals and investments in the past nine years.In 2016, Irish Life positioned itself as the third-largest health insurer in the market through the acquisition of Aviva Health and the remaining 51 per cent of GloHealth, a business whose formation it had supported four years earlier.

Some €6 billon of the €16 billion of assets advised by its intermediary and wealth business units is invested in Irish Life products, he said. It also launched a digital investment phone app, called Smart Invest, last year to make it easy for people to invest and track the performance of their portfolio. The group this week launched an app, called MyIrishLife, where customers can have access to a dashboard of all policies they have with various parts of the group.

He maintains that the Irish system is pretty much insulated from the type of turmoil that struck the UK pensions funds sector in recent weeks

 

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