Swiss Life Continues to Orient to Fees From Advice and Real Estate Asset Management

Swiss Life's development has been hampered over the years due to the structure of a long-term savings market overshadowed by low and declining government bond yields. However, Swiss Life is an evolving business that increasingly generates earnings from fees. Of its three income sources, the fee and commission income has almost doubled over the last 10 years. Sources of fees stretch across advice, asset management, and unit-linked fees. Now, Swiss Life is a slightly different business. Its advisory business is one of the strongest in Europe and provides high-quality advice to wealthy individuals. Advisors tend to take their time and focus on specific characteristics and circumstances of each client, then develop tailored goals and suggest products to meet their needs. We think Swiss Life has extended this to most core markets beyond its domestic one, focusing on Germany and key wealth transfer markets. The emphasis is on helping customers build enough wealth to live life as they want. More recently, the business has built on core and market-leading domestic BVG autonomous and semiautonomous solutions with the acquisition of Swiss Re's ElipsLife.