BEIJING, March 23 (Xinhua) -- China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) gave the nod to opening of a new pension insurance firm in the country, reported Xinhua Finance citing an announcement released by the Chinese regulator on Tuesday.
The insurer, as the tenth pension insurer approved to operate business, was jointly initiated by 17 companies, which include the industry leading banking, insurance and securities institutions.
Among them, there are 10 wealth management subsidiaries of banks and the newly approved pension insurer boasts a registered capital of 11.15 billion yuan, far exceeding the comparable data of its peers.
Chart: Top five shareholders of the newly-approved pension insurance company
Data source: CBIRC
As Securities Daily reported, opening of the new pension insurance firm is expected to spur innovation in professional pension insurance sector, helpful to enrich the related products and services and invigorate the third pillar pension market, or market-oriented personal pension market in China.
The newspaper quoting experts said products of existing pension insurance firms in China are relatively not rich enough and their insufficient client coverage is hard to satisfy the varied demand of customers.
As the CBIRC announcement tells, the new pension insurer is nodded to operate annuity, life insurance, accident insurance, health insurance, the reinsurance business of the aforementioned business, management of Renminbi and foreign currency funds for the purpose of pension security entrusted by clients, consulting services related to pension management, and insurance capital utilization permitted by the laws and regulations.
Zhou Jin, a PwC China financial services consulting partner told Securities Daily that pension industry and related financial market have huge opportunities for professional pension insurance institutions to develop alongside the accelerating population aging.
In the past two years, the Chinese regulator remained rather cautious in approving new pension insurance firms in a bid to avoid worsening of competition of homogeneous products if the new comers lack sustainable operating capability and their businesses lack characteristics, according to Zhou.
The CBIRC approval of the new pension insurance firm pointed to greatly increased attention of the regulators to professional and standardized pension management, held Dong Dengxin, head of the finance and securities research institute under Wuhan University of Science and Technology. (Edited by Duan Jing with Xinhua Silk Road, duanjing@xinhua.org)
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