A little breathing room for life insurance. After falling into the red in August when the French pulled 700 million euros of capital from its contracts, the flagship savings product attracted 453 million euros in net flows in September, France Assureurs announced on Friday. .

The sale is driven by the pension savings scheme (PER). This product, created just three years ago by the Pacte law, raised 449 million euros net in capital last month. Without it, the market collection would be zero. “It’s fair, but the fact is that PER is life insurance,” said Franck Levallois, CEO of France Assureurs, during a press briefing.

gondola head

PER benefits from favorable winds unlike traditional contracts. The latter is hampered by the interest rate hike, the economic slowdown, inflation and the doubling of the passbook A interest rate in August.

With the remuneration raised to 2%, the regulated savings account is in the lead ahead of the Eurofund, the historic life insurance product that returned only 1.3% on average in 2021. Thus, last month the French placed 3.1 billion euros in their booklet A and its cousin LDDS. A record for the month of September.

For its part, PER drains several tens of thousands of new customers and more than 500 million euros in gross premiums every month, according to France Assureurs.

Given the youth of the product, placed at the head of the gondola of distributors, the benefits paid (in case of termination of the contract, death or transmission) are still very limited. Hence net collection (contributions minus benefits) that is always positive. It is mainly oriented towards units of account (UC), which offer more diversified investments (shares, real estate, private equity, etc.) than funds in euros, but with no guarantee of the invested capital.

“TINA” effect

All media combined, the French raised 2 billion euros from funds in euros in September and 14.4 billion since the beginning of the year. Conversely, unit-linked entities collected €27 billion despite the fall in equity and bond markets. In total, the life insurance market has accumulated 12.6 billion euros in net flows since 1^eh January.

“There is still no alarm today about redemptions, because life insurance is still benefiting from savers’ wait-and-see attitude and a TINA effect, because “there is no alternative” in the markets”, assesses Sébastien Mathieu, partner in the advisory firm Oliver Wyman.

PR 6 million

PER alone collected €3.9 billion or 30% of flows. An achievement, knowing that its outstanding only reached 43 billion at the end of September, out of the 1,800 billion in life insurance assets listed by France Assureurs.

On the scale of the French market, the total outstanding amounts of PER amounted to almost 70 billion euros at the end of June, according to Bercy, which also takes into account the figures from the associations of Mutualité française, pension institutions and managers. of assets. The success is there, knowing that the public authorities bet on 50 billion in assets by the end of 2022.

With 6 million recipients, the target of 3 billion at the end of the year has also largely been exceeded. With one caveat: the product’s growth is essentially linked to the transfer of old life insurance or pension savings contracts to the new medium. And the fees paid by customers are “excessive”, warned Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire last year.