Although banks are still in the minority in the property-casualty insurance market, they continue to gain ground against traditional insurers, as confirmed by their annual results.
Growth in bancassurance portfolios
French banks are selling more and more car and home insurance policies to their customers. In 2019, the trend was already towards growth in customer portfolios; in 2020, this growth has accelerated, sometimes even outstripping that of traditional insurers.
Crédit Agricole saw sales of motor and home insurance contracts increase by 3.6% between 2019 and 2020. The same trend applies to Crédit Mutuel, which recorded a year-on-year increase of 3% for home insurance policies, and 2% for motor insurance policies.
These two bancassurers had already seen strong growth in 2019, greater than that of traditional insurers such as AXA, Matmut, Covéa or Macif. Although the incumbents still have a large majority in motor insurance, with over 70% market share compared with 16% for bancassurers, the latter are steadily gaining ground.
Some traditional insurers are holding up well
While the annual results of mutual insurers such as Macif and Covéa have not yet been published, some major groups such as AXA regained market share in 2020, after 5 consecutive years of declining figures.
This increase of 40,000 contracts for individuals is due to motor insurance, which also enabled Maif to attract 65,000 new policyholders in 2020. The latter probably benefited from its communication campaign last spring, which consisted in passing on to 2.8 million policyholders the 100 million euros saved thanks to the reduction in motor claims during the containment period.
However, the banks are still on the offensive, and intend to continue gaining market share, as property-casualty insurance contracts offer them greater profitability than credit, where rates are very low.
While only 10% of Société Générale Group customers have taken out home, car, telephone or health insurance, the figure at Crédit Agricole is 42%. La Banque Postale intends to market non-life insurance to 30% of its customers by 2025.