Our Stockholm branch is responsible for reinsurance business in Scandinavia and the Baltic states as well as Turkey and Israel. Eastern European markets are served centrally by an underwriting team based in Hannover.

In Sweden and Norway we have ranked among the marketleading reinsurers for more than ten years now. We maintain long-term relationships with our clients and cooperate closely on developing tailored reinsurance solutions for conventional covers of the biometric risks of mortality and morbidity. We are also active in the area of financing arrangements and the bancassurance sector.

The premium income booked by our life branch in Stockholm amounted to EUR 81.5 million (EUR 78.0 million) in the year under review, almost all of which was retained for own account. Business continued to develop favourably, enabling us to again boost profitability and report pleasing results.

Since 2009 we have also served Central and Eastern European markets directly from Hannover, with a focus on Poland and Hungary as well as certain CIS states. In addition to sound reinsurance expertise our actuaries and underwriters can draw on superb familiarity with the specific languages and cultures thanks to their own background; this enables them to provide support geared to our clients’ needs with an appropriate level of market intimacy.

Our concentration in these markets is on bancassurance and unit-linked insurance. The success of these products can be attributed in part to the use of the bank counter as an additional sales channel as well as to access to existing customer relationships. As a reinsurer, we provide our business partners with crucial support for the implementation of point-of-sale systems.

We vigorously enlarged our premium volume in this region in the year under review, posting decisive gains not only in Russia and Kazakhstan but also in Poland and Hungary. Our premium volume in the year under review totalled EUR 11.0 million (EUR 5.2 million), thereby surpassing the 10 million euro mark for the first time. The result recorded for this region was very positive.