Selling insurance has surprisingly become a "performance dark horse"? Last year, some bank individual insurance agents saw their income surge by over 50%. This year, the bancassurance channel is still expected to soar.

The 2025 financial reports that banks have released one after another recently show that last year banks made a lot of money by selling insurance on behalf of insurers.

By the end of 2025, the business scale of China CITIC Bank’s insurance distribution totaled 24.57B yuan, up 24.69% year over year.

Ping An Bank’s agency personal insurance premium volume increased by 35.3% year over year. The bank disclosed that last year its wealth management fee income was 5.06B yuan, up 15.8% year over year; among this, income from agency personal insurance was 1.29B yuan, up 53.3% year over year.

Data from insurance companies reveals the banks’ preference for leading insurance institutions. Last year, China Life’s bank-insurance channel total premium reached 110.87B yuan, breaking the trillion-yuan mark, up 45.5% year over year, and new policy premiums reached 58.51B yuan, up 95.7% year over year.

From the annual reports of multiple banks and insurance institutions, it is not hard to see that as more dividend-focused insurance plans are moved onto bank shelves, dividend-focused insurance sells very well through bank-insurance channels.

Industry insiders, when interviewed, expect that driven by the decline in market interest rates and residents’ ongoing demand to renew policies, bank-insurance growth in 2026 is likely to continue.

The data disclosed in China Life’s annual report shows that last year the bank-insurance channel implemented the “unified reporting and payment system” policy, which helped drive cost control and efficiency gains, resulting in a major increase in both premium scale and new business value. Core bank-insurance indicators show total premiums of 110.87B yuan, breaking the trillion-yuan mark, up 45.5%; new policy premiums of 58.51B yuan, up 95.7%. First-year single-premium-equivalent recurring premiums reached 26.48B yuan, up 41.0%; renewal premiums were 52.37B yuan, up 13.1%.

In terms of channel cooperation, last year the number of partner banks exceeded 100, and the number of new-policy issuing outlets reached 77k, up 25.9%, including a year-over-year increase of 49.1% in the number of star outlets. In addition, the bank-insurance channel had 20k customer managers, and average productivity per capita increased by 53.7% year over year.

The bank-insurance channel has also become a major driving force behind Sunshine Life’s growth. In 2025, Sunshine Life’s bank-insurance channel premium income was 67.46 billion yuan, up 34.8%. Of this, new policy premiums were 34.09 billion yuan, up 69.0% year over year; activity productivity per capita was 148k yuan, maintaining high productivity levels.

By comparison, Sunshine Life’s individual insurance channel premium income was 77k yuan, up 13.6%. Of this, new policy premiums were 20k yuan, down 7.6% year over year.

For foreign insurance firms, in 2025, AIA’s new business value in the Chinese mainland market increased by 2% to 1.24 billion USD over the year. Of the new business value, agents accounted for 85%, and the remaining 15% of new business value came from bank insurance.

AIA stated that with this growth momentum, in the first two months of 2026, its new business value grew by more than 20% year over year.

Individual insurance and bank insurance are the two main channels for life insurance sales. Starting in 2018, individual insurance entered a deep adjustment period. To ease business pressure, insurers renewed their efforts to strengthen the bank-insurance channel to supplement scale premiums. Starting in 2020, the booming sales of increasing whole-life insurance policies driven recurring premiums via the bank-insurance channel, and their value rates were higher than those of single-premium products; major insurers increased their development efforts in the bank-insurance channel. After the “unified reporting and payment system” in bank-insurance channels began to be implemented in August 2023, fee and cost levels fell significantly, driving value rates higher substantially. Combined with the relaxation of the “1+3” outlet limitations, leading companies have all worked hard to expand bank-insurance channels, and the leading companies’ market share in bank-insurance channels has continued to rise.

Worth mentioning is that multiple insurers have said that sales of floating-income products represented by dividend-focused insurance are improving. China Life data shows that the proportion of dividend-focused insurance new policy premiums increased by about 15 percentage points year over year. Sunshine Life data shows that last year, in new-policy recurring premium, floating-income products accounted for 32.2%.

Dividend-focused insurance also enriches the products on bank shelves. Ping An Bank said that last year the company complied with the market’s introduction of multiple dividend-focused insurance products and high-end medical insurance products, continuously increasing the richness of the insurance products on its shelves. CITIC Bank said that in 2025 it continued to enrich the types of insurance it distributes, deepening tiered and categorized operations, and coordinated with high-quality partner insurers to build a保障 product system covering needs such as health, retirement, and inheritance. Through scenario-based campaigns and professional services, it enhanced business value and maintained a healthy structure.

In the view of industry participants, behind banks’ push to distribute insurance is the reality that net interest margins are being compressed continuously, while insurance distribution can effectively add to intermediary business income, becoming an important growth point for profits.

Taking Ping An Bank as an example, in 2025 its net interest margin was 1.78%, down 0.09 percentage points year over year; CITIC Bank’s net interest margin was 1.63%, down 0.14 percentage points year over year.

There are signs that this year dividend-focused insurance may be able to secure a “C position” on bank shelves. Recently, after visits to multiple bank branches, a reporter from 每经记者 found that institutions are increasing their promotion of dividend-focused insurance, and dividend-focused insurance with a preset interest rate of 1.75% has become the mainstream product in today’s bank-insurance channel.

CITIC Bank said in its annual report that in 2026, its wealth management business will accelerate capacity release, seize structural opportunities such as the capital market and dividend insurance, and provide clients with differentiated, professional asset allocation solutions.

Song Zhanjun, deputy secretary-general of the China Insurance Research Institute at Beijing Technology and Business University, told reporters from 每日经济新闻 that currently the preset interest rate of life insurance products still has an advantage compared with bank term deposit rates, so in 2026 the bank-insurance channel will still maintain a fast development momentum.

A research report from Guojin Securities shows that when selling insurance products, wealth managers mainly value customer returns and insurers’ brands; next are sales expenses and add-on value-added services. Based on the current situation, insurers with strong investment capability can demonstrate higher demonstration interest rates (that is, customer returns) during front-end sales, so dividend-focused insurance sales advantages are stronger.

“Future floating-income products led by dividend insurance, unlike increasing whole-life insurance policies with clearly stated policy benefits that bank-insurance channels have emphasized in recent years, impose higher requirements on product explanations and customer service for sales personnel in the bank-insurance channel.” Song Zhanjun emphasized that in 2026, bank-insurance channels should place even more importance on the risk of potential sales misguidance.

(责任编辑：刘思嘉 ）

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