“We still want to become market leader, but to us it is very important to grow constantly at a faster pace than the overall market and reach our profitability targets,” Bunea told ZF in an interview after returning to Romania.
MetLife recruited Bunea from the ING group where she had served as chief financial officer for Europe in the last few years, transferred to the Amsterdam headquarters in 2010. Before that, she had run the local private pension company of ING.
ING owns the largest life insurer in Romania, ING Asigurari, whose market share stands at more than 30%. Metropolitan Life has a 16% market share, which it got after integrating the former local subsidiary of Aviva last year and is the second leading life insurer in this country.
Emilia Bunea says her desire to return to the major league of business and the fact that she had been missing her country were what made her decide to take the offer of Metropolitan Life.
“The decision was simple, I wanted to go back to Romania, but the situation of my former company did not allow it. MetLife gave me the chance to go back to business.”
She says the local life insurance market has seen positive changes in the last four years, as well as some recoils, especially when it comes to consumers’ confidence in insurers.
“It’s easier to do business here than in other countries considering the growth prospects of the market.”
MetLife arrived in Romania in 2010 when it bought the life insurance unit of AIG (the former Alico) in a global deal. The local company’s CEO until this year was Theodor Alexandrescu, who had been working for AIG since late nineties. He was put in charge of MetLife’s operations in the Persian Gulf area, so the company recruited Emilia Bunea to replace him.
Bunea says she is confident that the market will live up to its potential, but will not provide any forecast of the insurance industry because things can very easily change on short term.
“I would like to see tax deductibility in the insurance business. A significant step has been taken towards it but it’s not enough. I also saw a good step proposed in the new Fiscal Code, the total deductibility for employer and employee. It’s only a draft, of course, but I hope it will be implemented,” Metropolitan Life’s CEO said.
The US owner of Metropolitan Life set some clear directions, the most important of which are keeping the share of the protection insurance as it is, which currently stands at 40% of the portfolio, and a higher focus on average income customers.
“We want to balance our portfolio, currently dominated by traditional policies, which is why we set out to sell more on the unit-linked insurance segment. Still, we don’t encourage customers to take high risks, we encourage low risk investment. Policy redemptions have gone down, but insured customers continue to prefer traditional policies.”
Metropolitan Life’s CEO says mid-year figures show the insurer is on track with its growth trajectory budgeted at the beginning of 2014, but did not provide any exact data.
Metropolitan Life ranked second with 264 million lei (EUR59.4 million) revenue last year, less than half of rival ING Asigurari’s revenue.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)