Albania

Axco provides details on the life insurance sector including Albanian market participants, reinsurance and distribution channels. The reports describe classes of business from both individual and group life such as whole life, endowment, term life and unit-linked.
Information on non-life classes for example critical illness and private medical insurance.

The report describes the public and private healthcare system in Albania, the scope of cover, accessibility financing and provides an analysis of how the public and private systems complement each other.

Axco reports on the three pillars of Albania pension provision.

• State pension benefits including benefit calculations and eligibility criteria 
• Workplace pension provision; types of schemes calculations eligibility and; tax implications
• Voluntary individual pension provision, type of products and tax implications

The Albania report provides an in-depth analysis of the regulatory framework governing social security as well as details on financing and eligibility. Information includes but is not limited to

• state pensions,
• permanent disability benefit
• occupational accident and disease
• maternity and paternity payments 

Summary & Trends

No life insurance was written in Albania until 1997, and the high growth rates are therefore a reflection of a low baseline. One early growth area, from around 2004-05, was credit life, which in 2005 showed growth of 276.3%. From 2006-07 most of the growth in life premium was accounted for in travel PA, written as a rider to an increasing number of life policies. From 2007 to 2011 credit life showed consistently good growth rates, since when it has reduced overall, although in 2017 it was again at the same level as in 2011. Since that time, market premium income fell by 5.16% in 2018 and increased by 7.96% in 2019. Currently, the life market remains small and unsophisticated, and is still dominated by individual credit life insurance.

Summary and Trends

The social insurance system provides among other benefits, a universal old-age pension. financed by contributions from employers, employees and self-employed persons. There is a small additional Pillar II, voluntary pension sector, comprised of three voluntary pension funds. In 2006 supervision of the private pension market was transferred to the AMF. In 2006 these funds had a total of 2,621 contributors and had accumulated funds of about ALL 13.15mn (USD 109,748). At the end of December 2018, the number of contributors had grown to 25,298, growth of almost 20.8% in the year, whilst contributions had grown to ALL 1.37bn (USD 11.43mn), growth of over 47.05% during the year.

Summary and Trends

Little genuine healthcare insurance was offered in the market in the past, but it is now growing significantly. With the exception of travel health insurance written by the non-life market to enable Albanian travellers to obtain visas, the only forms of medical insurance product available were, until recently, hospital cash benefit plans, surgical plans and critical illness cover, a large percentage of which were written as a rider to life policies.Health premiums written in the life sector in 2019 were ALL 20.03mn.

The first private hospital was licensed by the Ministry of Health in  2009,  there are now ...