South Korea's financial authorities plan to widen the window for converting savings insurance policies into annuities, allowing applications from one year before maturity until three years after, instead of requiring them before maturity. The change is intended to encourage annuity conversion so policyholders can better prepare for retirement.
The authorities have drawn up an improvement plan for the savings insurance annuity conversion system and will announce it this month, according to financial industry sources on the 1st.
Savings insurance sets aside part of the premium and returns it as a maturity benefit or surrender value, functioning largely as a lump-sum savings vehicle. Policyholders can also receive a tax exemption on insurance gains if certain conditions are met. Under current rules, even policies that include an annuity conversion rider require the application to be filed before maturity while the contract remains in force. Once the contract ends at maturity, conversion is no longer possible.
The plan centers on extending the application period to a span running from one year before maturity to three years after. Policyholders who apply a year before maturity will begin receiving payments at the original maturity date, with the funds drawn from the accumulated reserve at maturity rather than the surrender value at the time of application. Those who miss the maturity date, by contrast, will have up to three years afterward to choose annuity conversion. "This gives policyholders who passed the maturity date and lost the chance to convert time to reconsider whether to take an annuity," a financial industry official said.
Maturity benefit payouts on savings-type insurance, excluding annuity products, totaled 6.9702 trillion won ($5.1 billion) last year, according to the Korea Life Insurance Association. The plan is less a mechanism for converting that entire pool into annuities than a way to broaden the option of receiving maturity funds as regular payments rather than a lump sum. For policyholders whose maturity date coincides with retirement, it offers a means of spreading a lump sum into a steady cash flow.
For insurers, the change reduces outflows of maturity funds and creates an opening to bring that money back into annuity products. Savings-type insurance has been declining, driven by tighter commission rules and a shift in insurers' sales strategies toward protection-type products following the adoption of the new international accounting standard IFRS 17. Even so, as of the end of June, savings-type policies accounted for 9,860,584 contracts among life insurers' individual policies, with a contract value of 362.0428 trillion won, or 16.7% of the total value of individual insurance contracts.
Against that backdrop, the insurance industry has repeatedly argued for maintaining asset size by drawing maturity reserves back into single-premium products rather than expanding sales of new savings insurance. The Korea Insurance Research Institute has also recommended a strategy of linking savings insurance maturity reserves of policyholders nearing retirement age to single-premium or deferred annuities. "This appears aimed at increasing retirement income for those who cannot rely on the National Pension Service alone," a financial industry official said.
