Fortis Life UK grows protection business after good results

Thursday, August 26, 2010

UK insurers Fortis Life have announced that their protection business is showing an upturn following the publication of their half-yearly results. The insurers have been undertaking a whole of market rollout, following a decision to re-launch their organisation under the new brand of Ageas.

Fortis announced that their plans to re-brand are running smoothly, and they expect to achieve the full conversion to the new brand by the first quarter of next year. Their half-yearly results demonstrated that they have achieved a growth in their new annual protection premiums by two-thirds to £10.6m. This is a significant growth in comparison with last year’s £6.4m for the same period.

Although this shows a positive growth, the company also reported that they lost around two million pounds over the first six months of 2010. Fortis estimate that it now holds over five percent of the market share in the UK, following their launch in July 2008.

The company provides insurance cover for almost one hundred thousand UK customers, and gets over seven hundred applications from new customers, every day. This is a significant upturn for the organisation, who had just 63,000 customers at the end of last year.

Barry Smith, the chief executive of Fortis, commented on the announced results: "I am pleased that Fortis has delivered a robust set of results despite the continuing difficult economic environment. Our income growth is strong, thanks to our multi-distribution strategy and we have demonstrated our aim to grow further with the acquisition of Kwik-Fit Insurance Services and continuing new business wins.”

"Following a challenging first quarter for the whole industry, we are now seeing improvements in our profit and ratio performance and expect to see further improvement during the rest of the year.”