GROWTH OF LIFE INSURANCE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18446, 6 January 1922, Page 3

GROWTH OF LIFE INSURANCE

In an interesting note upon 50 years of British life insurance the Economist says: “.Fifty years, a' brief moment in the world’s history, though a large slice out of a man’s life, has witnessed a very great change in that branch of the insurance business which is at once the most necessary and the most directly' human. What our ancestors did without it. we find it difficult to imagine. They rebuilt London after the great fire—there was 1 then no fire insurance—out of savings in their Stockings. But when a young man dies untimely, his stockinged hoard must be ,lean; there is smaE provision for widow or children in them. In its development the most necessary branch of insurance has strpngely been the slowest. In 1871 there were 62 companies doing ordinary : life business, and the largest premium income enjoyed by any one of them was £536,889. In 1920, in spite of amalgamations, there were 86 offices, among which the largest premium income (ordinary) of any office was the Prudential’s £8,800,748. It was not untE 1890 that any life office collected annually .a million pounds in premiums, and 10 years later there were no more than two —the Prudential and ' the Scottish Widowa In 1910 there were five ‘millionaire’ life offices, and in 1900 no less thai*'l3 sharing between them a premium income of over 25i millions. The biggest 13 offices in 1871 had collective premiums of £3,833,132. We see, therefore, from this rough summary that the expansion in'life business has been rrtuch greater during the last. 10 years than in the previous decade, and greater during the first 10 years of the twentieth century than in the course of the last 30 years of the, nineteenth. Of late, the growth in life assurance and in premium incomes has been accelerated by the faffing" off in value of money; ’the future of most of us calls for a, larger provision in depreciated; currency than in prewar sterling.” " ’