Insurance
From The Report: Morocco 2014
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Morocco’s insurance market has become more competitive in recent years. It is now Africa’s second-largest insurance market in terms of penetration after South Africa and the third-largest in the Middle East and North Africa after Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Total premiums in 2012 reached €2.3bn, up 8.9% on the previous year. Non-life premiums – thanks to automobile coverage – continued to dominate, representing some 66% of the market in 2012 at a value of Dh17.19bn (€1.5bn), compared to Dh8.84bn (€785m) for life premiums. Growth continued in 2013, with provisional data indicating that premiums for the first six months of the year totalled €1.3bn, up 3.1% over the same period in 2012. The insurance market is expected to continue to expand in the medium to long term, in line with growth in sectors such as construction, real estate and manufacturing. In the meantime, the industry will carry on developing new products and new ways to access segments of the population that are still uninsured. This chapter contains an interview with Mohamed Hassan Bensalah, President, Moroccan Federation of Insurance and Reinsurance Companies.

Articles from this Chapter

Overview

In pursuit of growth: The sector records an increase in premiums, while new products are introduced to the market
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With local insurers developing new products in an effort to reach currently unserved segments of the population, Morocco’s insurance market has become more competitive in recent years. As a result, the domestic penetration rate, or total premiums as a percentage of GDP, increased to 2.95% in 2012, up from 2.8% in 2011 and 2.3% in 2010. Indeed, Morocco is now Africa’s second-largest insurance market in terms of penetration after South Africa and the third-largest in the Middle East and North Africa after Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Similar to banking sector players, Moroccan insurers are also increasingly expanding into other, less-developed…

Analysis

A balancing act: Reforming the pension system
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Similar to many countries around the world, Morocco’s retirement system is at a crossroads, facing a challenging balancing act of maintaining coverage with an increasingly constrained set of financial circumstances. However, unlike many more developed countries beleaguered with an ageing population and falling birth rates, young people make up some 30% of Morocco’s population. Their inclusion into the formal system and the retirement scheme can mitigate many of the problems more developed countries’ pension schemes face. But therein lies the crux of Morocco’s pension system problems: inclusion. While official figures put unemployment…

Interview

OBG talks to Mohamed Hassan Bensalah, President, Moroccan Federation of Insurance and Reinsurance Companies
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Interview:Mohamed Hassan Bensalah Which market niches do you anticipate will be major catalysts for growth in the insurance sector in 2014? MOHAMED HASSAN BENSALAH: In the insurance sector, market trends vary little from one year to the next unless there has been a major regulatory change that has accelerated the development of a specific branch. For example, major catalysts for growth will be life and health insurance, along with workers’ compensation and car insurance, which have enjoyed…