Dutch insurance firm Achmea and US investment firm Sixth Street Partners are merging their pension activities into a new joint venture that will enter the buyout market for Dutch pension funds.
Achmea will initially have a stake of 80% in the new joint venture, which will pool the business of Lifetri and the pension and life insurance activities of Achmea. Sixth Street will get a 20% stake for bringing in Lifetri’s €2bn in pension and life assets as well as paying a sum of €445m to Achmea.
Sixth Street has the possibility to increase its stake to 30% at a later stage if it pays an additional, unspecified amount to Achmea.
Insurance firm Lifetri entered the Dutch buyout market in 2020 as a challenger to the more established players Aegon/ASR, Zwitserleven and NN Group. However, the firm failed to seal any additional deals after having concluded its first buyout with the Dutch pension fund of insurance firm Allianz in 2020.
After a deal with the pension fund of oil trading firm Calpam was scuppered by regulator DNB in early 2024, Lifetri decided to suspend its activities on the buyout market and its chief executive officer Phillippe Wits departed.
Balance sheet
“A lack of commercial results was reason for us to start a strategic reorientation,” said Lifetri’s new director Rutger Zomer.
“We had started noticing, also in our pitches to pension funds, that our balance sheet of €2bn was on the small side. There certainly is a relationship between the size of your balance sheet and the kind of deals you can win. There will not be many players with €3bn or €4bn in assets that would do a deal with us having just €2bn in assets on our balance sheet,” he said.
“If we had continued pitching with a balance sheet of €2bn that would not have been successful.”
Asked why it took Lifetri four years to realise it was too small to compete on the Dutch buyout market, Zomer said the dearth of deals in the intervening period (only a handful of buyouts concluded between 2021 and 2023) meant “there was little concrete evidence that our [small] balance sheet could be a problem”.
So Lifetri went searching for a bigger partner, and eventually joined forces with Achmea, a large Dutch insurance firm with a balance sheet of some €87bn. The new joint venture still awaits approval from regulator DNB which could take “at least half a year,” Zomer said.
As a result, the new firm will enter the market under the name Achmea Pensioen & Leven (Pension & Life) in the latter half of next year.
“Only after the closing of the deal will we be able to respond to requests for proposal from pension funds,” said Bianca Tetteroo, Achmea’s CEO.
Centraal Beheer is aiming for a share of 20% in the Dutch buyout market which is expected to have a size of some €20-€30bn until 2028. To date, only a few billion euros in deals have been concluded, involving mainly smaller, closed company pension schemes.
This article was first published on Pensioen Pro, IPE’s Dutch sister publication. It was translated and adapted for IPE by Tjibbe Hoekstra
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