Seguros Monterrey reported, until the end of 2021, a total of 2.5 million insured persons, being the third largest company in medical expenses insurance and the fourth in life insurance in the country. It cost the company 2,713 million pesos to attend to Covid cases last year.
“I think we are going to continue to have a stable market, (but) with some problems, not in the number of policies but in their amount. People are going to continue taking out insurance, but perhaps the sum insured will decrease,” the manager commented.
CEO of Monterrey New York Life Insurance added that the medical inflationclose to an annual rate of 17% -and which is above the general indicator, of 7.88%- will continue to affect the price of medical expense insurance policies, particularly.
“An economic situation in Mexico, where we are experiencing a high inflation rate and where the pandemic generated some type of recession, affects the number of policy contracts,” he said.
And to face the economic environment, Seguros Monterrey will seek to attract more clients by professionalizing its advisors to provide personalized attention according to the user’s profile.
The company, which has invested close to 10 million dollars in the last three years, seeks to improve the technological tools used by advisors when creating the profile of each client.
Although some insurers have said the pandemic caused a change in the methodology for measuring risk of a person, Seguros Monterrey assures that in his case, this will not happen.
“At the moment, no. It will continue as we have always done. (COVID) is a temporary event and we have to wait to see what kind of sequels develop and how life expectancies are rearranged. We do the planning in decades,” Cantu said.
As for the investment products that they offer, Cantú highlighted that there is a good expectation about the yields that there will be in the following months thanks to the increase that the Bank of Mexico (Banxico) has made in the reference rate
In the past week, Banxico raised the rate by 75 base points , an increase, due to its magnitude, unprecedented, taking it to 7.75%. This year the rate is expected to reach a historical level of up to 9.5%.
Although the insurer has had an attractive first half of growth, it does not want to be overconfident and will wait to see how the national economy performs in the second half of the year, especially with the shadow of a possible recession in the United States, the main commercial partner of Mexico and major driver of the economy.
“The Mexican economy has become, for those seeking to diversify their investment portfolios, an economy that is attended. Other economies that used to be attended, such as Brazil, China, Russia, India and Eastern Europe, they have much more complex problems than the Mexican one,” said Cantú.
