Distribution of insurance products through a banking network, often backed by a group insurance subsidiary, the dominant model for savings and creditor cover in several Southern European countries.
Bancassurance rests on a simple observation: the bank network sees the life events that trigger an insurance need, a mortgage, a savings account, an inheritance, a business start, and it holds a relationship of trust and financial data no other distributor has. The model first took hold in life savings, where the product is close to a bank deposit, then in creditor insurance attached to loans, and finally in personal lines, where its progress is slower because claims handling is a trade foreign to banking. Its advantages are low acquisition cost and a high cross-holding rate. Its limits are threefold. Concentration of conduct risk, a defective sales practice reaching millions of customers at once. The model's dependence on tied selling, which consumer law and European law have progressively framed, notably on creditor insurance. And the difficulty of carrying products whose advice requires technical expertise a bank adviser does not have.
In France, bancassurance carries most life insurance inflows and a dominant share of creditor insurance. It is precisely on that second segment that the legislature intervened repeatedly from 2010 onward to allow delegation to a third-party insurer, up to the right to cancel at any time opened in 2022, measures aimed at breaking the tie to the loan rather than regulating the product.
bancassurance, distribution bancaire, modèle bancassureur, assurfinance