But this one moved quickly. The Helvetia–Baloise merger was announced in 2025 and completed the same year. In another industry that might sound normal. In insurance, it is a strong pace. Not because our sector is slow by nature, but because it is careful by obligation. Long-term promises. Supervision. Ratings. Balance-sheet trust. And a deep awareness that stability is part of the product.
When things move quickly in our business, it usually means the work started long before the public ever saw the first headline.
Why I expected something to happen
The environment has been tightening quietly.
When people ask “why now?”, I don’t think the answer lies in a single cause.
Still, a few forces are hard to ignore.
Digital transformation remains expensive and unavoidable. Not only new front-ends and apps, but the hard work underneath: data, architecture, claims systems, underwriting tooling, cybersecurity, integration layers.
Reporting and complexity have increased. Frameworks like IFRS 17 didn’t “cause” consolidation on their own, but they are part of a broader movement: insurance has become more transparent, more technical, and more demanding in terms of governance, data quality, and discipline.
Capital and resilience matter more than ever. Not just in solvency terms, but in market credibility. The ability to absorb shocks without losing strategic freedom.
In that environment, consolidation becomes easier to understand.
Not as a power move. But as a way to build strength.
The long-term voice
What I find fascinating is how predictable our reactions are.
When consolidation happens, we tend to speak about it in two voices.
The first voice is emotional:
- “Why are they doing this?”
- “What will it mean for people?”
- “Is it good or bad?”
The second voice is analytical:
- “Synergies.”
- “Scale.”
- “Efficiency.”
- “Capital strength.”
Both voices are valid.
But insurance has a third voice, one we rarely admit out loud.
It is the long-term voice.
The voice that asks a different question:
Will this institution still be here in 20 years?
Not as a brand. Not as a logo. But as a functioning promise-maker, still paying claims, still trusted, still relevant.
That is why consolidation in insurance is never just about ambition. It is often about durability.
And durability has its own rhythm. It comes in waves.
Insurance consolidation comes in waves and every wave has its own logic
If you zoom out over the last 30 years, consolidation in insurance does not look random. It comes in waves.
And each wave reflects the concerns of its time.
The 1990s: the reset decade
The 1990s were about scale and cross-border positioning.
Zurich’s strategic moves in that period are still shaping the group today. The acquisition of the financial services operations of British American Tobacco, which brought Farmers into Zurich’s orbit, is one of those deals that quietly changes the trajectory of a company for decades.
In France, AXA became a giant when it acquired UAP.
Allianz expanded strongly in that era too (after the purchase of AGF and parts of Athena assurances) and began building an asset management pillar with its acquisition of a controlling stake in PIMCO in 2000.
The 1990s were not just about getting bigger.
They were about building platforms to compete internationally / globally.
The 2000s: discipline after the bubble
Then came the early 2000s, and the tone changed.
After the dot-com bubble, after costly events and shocks that tested the industry, insurers had to do what insurers always end up doing: return to fundamentals.
- Improve combined ratios.
- Strengthen balance sheets.
- Reprice risk where needed.
- Clean up portfolios.
The period around 9/11 forced a repricing of risk and a renewed focus on fundamentals in P&C, including how catastrophic losses propagate through global markets.
In that decade, consolidation was still present, but the dominant theme was not expansion.
It was resilience.
The 2010s: targeted repositioning in a low-rate world
The 2010s brought a different kind of pressure: stubbornly low interest rates.
For life insurers in particular, this wasn’t theoretical. It affected profitability and capital intensity, especially for older portfolios built on guarantees written in another world.
One of the quiet themes of that decade was the gradual effort to reduce exposure to legacy guaranteed business, reshape product design, and shift toward models that made sense under a different yield environment.
And at the same time, large strategic deals returned:
- ACE–Chubb, completed in January 2016, created a global P&C leader.
- Sompo–Endurance, completed in 2017, showed how Japanese groups acquired global specialty capabilities.
- AXA–XL, completed in 2018, strengthened AXA’s position in commercial P&C and specialty.
This wave was less about “bigger is better”.
It was about choosing where to compete.
The 2020s: consolidation as repositioning
The 2020s have been a mix of domestic consolidation and portfolio reshaping.
One example I find particularly telling is Aegon.
In 2022, Aegon agreed to combine its Dutch insurance operations with ASR Nederland, receiving cash and a strategic stake in ASR.
This is consolidation, but of a different type.
It’s not just “buying growth”.
It’s repositioning: strengthening a domestic platform while freeing up capital and flexibility for the group’s broader strategy.
And it reflects a pattern we are seeing more often: insurers are not only merging to grow. They are reshaping themselves to remain investable, modern, and strategically coherent.
Life insurance back books: the quiet consolidation nobody sees
There is another wave happening in parallel, far less visible than the “headline mergers”, but arguably just as structural.
It is the consolidation of life insurance back books and closed blocks.
These are portfolios of long-dated liabilities, often with older product guarantees, where the key challenge is not distribution or growth, but efficiency, capital management, and asset-liability discipline.
In the United States, one of the most influential models has been Apollo Global Management’s insurance platform Athene, which was created to grow by acquiring and managing retirement and annuity liabilities with strong asset management capabilities.
In Europe, Athora has become one of the most active consolidators of life insurance portfolios, including closed books, and has expanded through acquisitions across markets.
Germany is a particularly interesting market in this respect.
Platforms like Viridium built scale by acquiring legacy German life portfolios, and in 2025 a consortium including Allianz, BlackRock, Generali Financial Holdings and T&D Holdings completed the acquisition of Viridium, underlining how strategically valuable these “quiet” books have become.
This back-book trend is important for one reason: it shows that consolidation is not only about “who sells more policies”. It is also about who can run complex long-term promises at the lowest operational cost, with the most disciplined capital and investment model.
Organic and inorganic growth
Two paths, same destination.
There is a simple way to remove ideology from this discussion.
Organic growth means improving and compounding within your existing model.
Inorganic growth means accelerating change by reshaping the model.
Both can be valid.
Organic growth builds culture and consistency.
Inorganic growth can create scale, capability, and speed.
And in insurance, speed is not about excitement.
It is about readiness.
Asset management is part of the story again
Watch this in the later 2020s
Insurance consolidation is not only about underwriting platforms. It also touches asset management and long-term savings.
Allianz buying PIMCO in 2000 was an early signal of that direction. More recently, BNP Paribas completed its acquisition of AXA Investment Managers in 2025, creating a much larger European asset management platform.
I would not be surprised if the later 2020s bring more moves on the asset management side, because investment capability, private markets access, and balance-sheet optimization have become strategic again.
A personal aside on AIG and a reminder about cycles
I have always had a soft spot for AIG, for personal reasons. Many of us do for one institution or another. Which is why I noticed the recent market noise with particular interest: trade press reported that Chubb had made an informal takeover bid for AIG in December 2025 in December 2025, with denials about having submitted an “offer”.
Whatever the reality of that episode, the symbolism is striking. AIG is historically associated with Hank Greenberg’s era. Chubb’s CEO is his son. That is not a governance argument. It is simply a reminder that this industry runs in long cycles and long memories.
The next crisis will reshape the industry again
It always does.
Every wave of consolidation has a catalyst.
- Sometimes it is capital markets.
- Sometimes it is catastrophe loss experience.
- Sometimes it is interest rates.
- Sometimes it is regulation.
And sometimes it is simply the accumulation of small pressures that make structural change rational.
If history teaches anything, it is that the next stress event, whatever form it takes, will accelerate decisions that currently look optional.
That is why I watch signals and not only headlines.
Will we say more in 2026?
I suspect we will.
Not necessarily with blockbuster mega-mergers every quarter.
But with more strategic moves that will look “sudden” only after they happen, even though the pressure was visible long before.
Because in insurance, the future rarely arrives as a surprise.
It arrives as a slow accumulation of constraints, until one day a merger announcement feels almost… logical.
And then LinkedIn confirms it, profile by profile.
Eric Lefebvre
Read also: Tuesday column by Eric Lefebvre: When the unit of account is Bitcoin
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