TCAP to see best quarter after sale of insurer

Anuwat Luengtaweekul, an executive vice president at TCAP, said the second quarter would post the firm’s highest quarterly earnings of 2013.
TCAP is the parent company of Thanachart Bank, which sold Thanachart Life Assurance for Bt18 billion. He declined to reveal the profit from selling the life-insurance unit but said the bottom line in the second quarter would certainly be higher than the first quarter’s Bt2 billion.
Prudential Life Assurance (Thailand), a subsidiary of Pru-dential, and TBank yesterday announced the completion of the sale of 100 per cent of the shares of Thanachart Life Assurance to Prudential Thailand and the commencement of their exclusive 15-year bancassurance partnership.
TBank has now begun distributing Prudential Thailand’s life-insurance products through its network of more than 630 branches across the country.
The integration of Thanachart Life’s operations has also started and, during the transition period, its policies will continue to be serviced by TLife. The terms and conditions of the policies remain unchanged.
Anuwat said the exclusive partnership would boost non-interest income from the current level of 40 per cent.
The profit from selling TLife will also help increase the bank’s capital-adequacy ratio by 1 percentage point from 13 per cent, and the higher ratio is expected to go into its official report in August.
Somjate Moosirilert, president and chief executive officer of TBank, said its staff had recently completed comprehensive training on the products and services from Pru-dential. They could now offer these high-quality insurance products to TBank’s customers.
“With Prudential’s world-class products offered by our trained staff through our extensive nationwide network, we are confident that the bancassurance partnership be-tween Prudential and Thana-chart will be highly successful,” he said.
Barry Stowe, CEO of Prudential Corporation Asia, said: “The acquisition of Thanachart Life and partnership with Thanachart Bank are key milestones for Prudential in Thailand and demonstrate our commitment to grow our operations here.”
Brendan King, deputy CEO of Thanachart Bank, said the partnership with Prudential was a further demonstration of TBank’s commitment to bring the best products and services to customers.
“Thanachart Bank and Pru-dential are committed to offering best-in-class products and services, and by closely working together, we are confident of being able to fully meet our clients’ increasingly complex insurance needs.”
Binayak Dutta, CEO of Pruden-tial Thailand, said: “We are pleased to receive approval to complete our acquisition of Thanachart Life and we will ensure that the integration is seamless.”