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The Ayala Life Assurance  Inc., the seventh largest life insurance company in the Philippines, joins forces with the Philippine American Life and General Insurance Company (Philamlife), the country’s largest life insurer. That is because Philamlife has acquired a 51-percent stake at Ayala Life through a bancassurance joint venture.

Trevor Bull, Philamlife’s newly appointed president and chief executive officer (CEO) said that the partnership is a result of its strategy to focus on the core life insurance and wealth management business. “This is an exciting positive development that will significantly increase our distribution footprint and offer a substantially wider selection of quality life insurance products to BPI’s customers, which are keys to success under the growing popularity of bancassurance in the region,” Trevor said.

Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) president and CEO Aurelio Montinola III, who was very optimistic on the partnership, said that their bank can access insurer’s customers for banking products while Philamlife would access their customer base for life insurance products. He added, “We always look for quality partners. We are excited about the prospects of this partnership with Philamlife. We believe that there are significant cross selling opportunities on both sides.”

BPI, who’s a 158-year old bank, serves more than three million customers through its network of over 800 branches and 1,500 ATM’s nationwide. BPI Capital and ING were the financial advisors to BPI while Deutsche Bank acted as sole financial advisor to Philamlife and AIA for this transaction.

Meanwhile, Philamlife is in the process of becoming part of the AIA, a leading pan-Asian life insurance organization with over $60 billion in assets and a large base of over 20 million customers.

The number of individual and corporate of policyholders of Philamlife has reached more than a million, which comprises of various financial needs products. These include retirement, education, income protection, health, investment, personal accident, group life and credit life.