The John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company announced yesterday a structural change, it is expected that a stroke of luck for the four million policyholders and management hopes, will help to consolidate the position of the company as the main insurer.
The decision by John Hancock, based in Boston during the civil war, follows the same action by Prudential Insurance Company of America and several other small businesses. All were originally structured as mutuals, cooperatives or in possession of insurance, and all converted or the transformation in enterprises, the shares sold to investors.
The companies say they must reserve problem, for money in capital markets and use to acquire shares in other companies in the insurance industry consolidated. Mutuals have no stock.
In a first step, John Hancock, Prudential and a few others, which produce profits to be distributed among policyholders. John Hancock’s accumulated profits, known in the insurance sector a surplus of around 3.2 billion dollars, according to Moody’s Investors Service .. It works on an average of $ 800 insurance. The cumulative profits is one of the size and nature of politics and the amount of premiums paid. So some, perhaps only restricted to a few hundred dollars, while thousands of others get, but all get reserve to society transformed. In the old labels, share prices rose sharply after the first tenders.
John Hancock has been a leader in a campaign to amend laws that the State would allow companies to pool holding companies, the question that their capital stock to acquire, without sharing profits with the pursuit of insurance.
Consumers have criticized, is in favour of the mutual holding company idea and called unfair to policyholders and a means for leaders to enrich himself.
Only last month, the New York State Assembly’s Insurance Committee said that conversions in New York could financially harm millions of policyholders.
Stephen L. Brown, CEO of John Hancock, said in an interview yesterday that the criticism was an important factor nicht”ein Hancock in”John decision to leave the holding mutual idea.
Legislation is pending in a Massachusetts, as in New York, which would grant mutual reserve holding companies. One of the reasons that you have set for the road, “said Brown, was that even if the legislation adopted in Massachusetts, it is not clear, as the changes made. Under the concept of mutual service, a company can reserve problem corresponds to 49 percent of their value. Under existing procedures, the whole company is owned by the public domain.
With the approach set out, Mr. Brown said:”We must improve access to capital and the monetary reserve,”a reference to the use of shares to acquire other companies.
Patrick Finnegan, Senior Analyst at Moody’s, insurance, said growing competition in the field of financial services was forcing companies like John Hancock”entwickeln flexible funding opportunities.”For mutuals, the only source of capital outside their merits is borrowing.
Jason Adkins, the founder of the Center for Insurance Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a leader of the campaign against mutual holding companies, said on reciprocity, others probably will follow John Hancock’s. But the two spokespersons of Metropolitan Life and New York Life, two hours from New York’s largest insurer, said it further, to the mutual holding company concept.