In insurance and advisory

Swiss Life offers its customers a wide range of solutions for their financial security and future provisions. Their term often extends over many years or even decades. Taking sustainability into account in product design and underwriting is therefore crucial.

As a life insurance company and based on the markets in which Swiss Life operates, the climate-related risks in underwriting are considered to be rather low. However, there are investment opportunities for Swiss Life’s customer assets.

Swiss Life has products with integrated sustainability aspects in various markets. For example, Swiss Life in Switzerland now offers a digitalised pillar 3a solution based on transparent investment portfolios and geared to consistently sustainable investments. The Investo Green pension insurance, which supports environmental and social features depending on the fund selection made by the customers, can be concluded at Swiss Life Germany in the area of unit-linked life insurance. It is possible to select funds that follow a sustainable approach.

As part of its new sustainability strategy, Swiss Life has set itself the goal of meeting customer demand for sustainable solutions with its own products and solutions and expanding its product range accordingly.

Swiss Life is therefore working on further sustainable insurance, pension and financial products by way of an ongoing product development process and increasingly also opening up digital sales channels for this purpose.

In particular, Swiss Life seeks to ensure that consideration of climate-related risks and opportunities is a growing part of its business development. Swiss Life therefore develops innovative products, taking into account the individual needs and preferences of its clients.

All Group divisions have launched local products with sustainability aspects in recent years. ESG factors are thus also included in the advisory processes for these products and solutions, and Swiss Life stepped up integration of the corresponding sustainability aspects– and therefore also climate-related aspects –in the advisory process and marketing and sales documents in 2021. This way the company is also meeting growing customer expectations. Swiss Life advisors therefore have an important role to play: they support customers in realising their needs and visions of sustainability.

Swiss Life will in future integrate the poll of (potential) customers’ individual sustainability preferences directly into its advisory processes and instruments in its divisions within the European Union in accordance with the regulatory requirements. In this way, the company aims to ensure that advisors carry out the appropriate suitability test to identify sustainability preferences and enable (potential) customers to make decisions which are based on a good information basis. With this aim, Swiss Life adheres to regulatory requirements of the European Union. Swiss Life is also preparing the poll of sustainability preferences and their standardised integration into the advisory processes and instruments in Switzerland. Advisors are already being made aware of the identification of corresponding customer needs and are offering sustainable solutions, provided these are already available in the desired product category.

Further information can be found in the Sustainability Report (section “Sustainability in Insurance and Advisory”).