Taiping Life Insurance Co Ltd, one of Chinese mainland's largest insurers, teamed up yesterday with the International Group Program, a United States-based global network of life insurers, to introduce its group insurance policies to more than 80 multinational companies in Shanghai.

The influx of multina-tionals has given domestic insurers a fresh revenue source as foreign-funded enterprises have to provide sound benefit packages to employees to attract them to join the companies.

Igp is a leading internatio-nal pooling program for multinational employee benefits. International pooling is especially established for multinational companies to combine their globally located subsidiaries' employee benefits programs together for the purpose of reducing risk fluctuation and lowering costs.

"The partnership enables multinational companies to take advantage of IGP's worldwide size and reduce employee benefits costs through the pooling of risks," said Wan Jieping, IGP repre-sentative at Taiping Life.

Shanghai-based Taiping Life was selected by IGP as its exclusive associate insurer on the Chinese mainland in March, when the US organi-zation won approval from the China Insurance Regula-tory Commission to pool certain insurance coverage.

Currently, overseas life insurers in China are not allowed to sell insurance policies to corporate clients and they are permitted to conduct only individual businesses.

The alliance with IGP can help Taiping Life get more multinational customers, which have already opened accounts under the IGP in overseas markets, to streng-then its performance in the mainland insurance market, said industry officials.

Taiping life collected premiums worth of around 1.81 billion yuan (US$218.07 million) last year, among which 416 million yuan were generated from group insurance sales.

Life insurers on the Chinese mainland collected premiums of 227.48 billion yuan last year, compared with 142.4 billion yuan a year earlier, according to the CIRC.

More than 30,000 foreign-funded companies have been set up in Shanghai with contracted investment worth US$70.39 billion by the end of July, according to the Shanghai Foreign Investment Commission.

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