With the health crisis linked to Covid-19, the French have shunned life insurance.
Over the whole of 2020, the finding remains clear, with 6.5 billion euros net out, slightly more than the 6.3 billion in 2012, the previous record.
A striking contrast with the Livret A, which has never attracted so much as this year.
The positive collection observed in December was not enough to change the trend for the year: in 2020, with the health crisis, the French shunned life insurance.
The amounts withdrawn reached 6.5 billion euros net, unprecedented.
For the first time since the start of the Covid-19 crisis in March, the month of December had nevertheless allowed a return to a positive net inflow of around 550 million, according to figures from the French Insurance Federation .
In December, life insurance companies thus garnered 12.8 billion euros and paid 12.3 billion euros in benefits.
The benefits consist of the sums withdrawn by the insured ("buy-backs") and those paid to the beneficiaries, following a death.
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"It is the continuation of a trend that we have observed for a few months, that of a return to equilibrium," Franck Le Vallois, director general of the FFA, told AFP.
It was in April and May that the difference between the investments made by the French and the benefits paid reached peaks (-2.3 billion euros each month), before it narrowed.
Some 50 million euros net were taken in November.
For Franck Le Vallois, this return to equilibrium "confirms the confidence of the French in life insurance", the leading savings product in France, with 1.789 billion euros in outstanding at the end of December.
French wait-and-see
Over the year as a whole, however, the finding remains clear, with 6.5 billion euros net out, slightly more than the 6.3 billion in 2012, the previous record.
Conversely, in 2019, 21.9 billion euros net had been collected.
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The 2020 trend is explained by a drop in insured deposits, and not by an increase in the sums disbursed: the public only deposited on life insurance contracts "only" 116.3 billion euros in 2020, against 144.6 billion euros the previous year.
In terms of services paid to policyholders, they reached 122.8 billion euros, against 122.7 billion euros disbursed in 2019. According to the director general of the FFA, this drop in payments is linked to the closure of the premises distribution during the first confinement and to "a form of wait-and-see attitude that was expressed" among the French concerning savings, and which made them prefer the most liquid investments.
The contrast with the Livret A is striking: it has never attracted as much as in 2020, earning 26.4 billion euros net, twice as much as in 2019.
More units of account
Another notable aspect in 2020: an increase in the share of unit-linked investments, which are more profitable but also more risky than funds in euros, whose capital is guaranteed.
They went from 28% in 2019 to 34% in 2020. An increase which can be explained by the efforts of insurers to encourage their policyholders to diversify their savings as well as by the continuous decline, year after year, in the returns of funds in euros.
The latter, popular for their security, are made up largely of sovereign bonds, which have seen their interest rates decline in recent years to fall into negative territory for some countries in the euro area.
And the monetary policies adopted to counter the effects of the health crisis, even more accommodating than they were in the past, have erased any prospect of improvement.
According to Cyrille Chartier-Kastler, founder of the site Good value for money, the returns of funds in euros should on average fall by 0.25 points compared to the previous year.