Life insurance: Athora sells 130,000 contracts to Frankfurter Leben

Further sales expected

130,000 customers: life insurer is sold

The market for life insurance is in flux in Germany. Now the Frankfurter Leben Group is buying a competitor. Further acquisitions are expected.

The purchase agreement has been signed: two of the three life insurance processors operating in Germany are merging. Bermuda-based Athora Holding is selling its German subsidiary to competitor Frankfurter Leben, which is backed by the Chinese Fosun Group, it announced on Thursday. This means that around 130,000 life insurance contracts are changing hands.

Athora and the Frankfurter Leben Group operate as consolidation platforms on the German market. They take over insurance portfolios from other insurers who no longer want to service them. Your goal: to be able to manage contracts more profitably through cost reductions and more efficient IT.

Athora started the German market with great ambitions in 2015 with the takeover of Delta Lloyd life insurance. However, further acquisitions, such as the takeover of a DBV-Winterthur portfolio of 700,000 contracts from Axa, failed, which is why Athora is now withdrawing from the German market.

The acquisition is important for the Frankfurter Leben Group. Since the consolidation platforms do not do any new business, the number of life insurance policies they manage is constantly falling. The managed stocks can only be expanded or kept constant through acquisitions. The last takeovers of the Frankfurter Leben Group were two years ago: in 2024, the consolidation platform took over Generali pension fund and the small insurer Landeslebenshilfe.

• 219,000 contracts: Insurer cancels planned sale
• Better than quitting: Selling life insurance – who is it worth it for?

With the Athora holdings, the Frankfurter Leben Group now manages 800,000 contracts. However, this puts it clearly behind the local market leader Viridium. The company in which, among other things, alliance and the asset manager Blackrock are involved, took over Generali Lebensversicherung in 2019 and manages around 3.1 million contracts.

The transaction is expected to be completed in 2027. The German financial regulator Bafin, among others, still has to give its approval. This checks to ensure that the insured are not worse off as a result of the sale of their contracts. According to experts, the focus is likely to be on the majority owner of the Frankfurter Leben Group, the Chinese Fosun Group.

Experts assume that more life insurers could sell old life insurance contracts in the future. At many insurers, the computer systems used to manage old contracts are sometimes very outdated and modernization would be time-consuming and costly. The sale of the old contracts therefore represents an interesting alternative for some providers. Experts estimate that such considerations could be accelerated by the upcoming reform of state-sponsored pension provision.

However, not every planned sale is actually realized in the end. R+V insurance recently canceled the sale of its subsidiary Condor Leben to a financial investor.