Entering group credit life through au Jibun Bank (2022)

What it means to hand over the gathering

What group credit life changed was not the cover being sold but where the customers came from. In direct selling, every policy written costs advertising money up front. In group credit, the sales force selling au Jibun Bank’s mortgages performs that role, and what remains with Lifenet is the work of pricing the mortality and morbidity of the pool that has been assembled. That the company held on to the underwriting through a ¥600 million loss in the first year, and repaired it at the July 2024 rate revision, was possible because group credit allows the rate to be reset annually. Pricing the entrance low only works on top of that mechanism.

Hand over the gathering and you hand over the right to decide how gathering is done. When au Jibun Bank began steering borrowers toward ordinary group cover at the end of November 2024, the growth in premiums received was placed at the mercy of a partner’s judgement. The tie-up with Kyoto Shinkin Bank is meant to loosen that dependence on a single counterparty. Nor did group credit alone produce the first profit in the eighteenth year: it coincided with individual new policies recovering from the seventy-thousands back into the eighty-thousands. In exchange for a second way of gathering customers, Lifenet acquired the permanent task of finding a second partner to gather them with.