Phoenix Group seems confident that the coronavirus will spur insurers to offload their closed books of life policies — to the obvious advantage of the FTSE 100 funds consolidator, an avid buyer (Miles Costello writes).
It also reckons that heightened concerns about the riskiness of company balance sheets will mean more businesses take out insurance cover against the liabilities in their pension schemes, again playing to its hand as a provider.
The group may well be right that insurers’ desire to free up capital will provide it with a rich seam of funds to buy, but it is gently ironic that it should be Phoenix that is making its own move to look at auctioning off its European arm. This is in the early stages
