Insurers Participating Fund Performance

I remember a few years back when buying insurance policies, there are two illustrations of the Cash Value of the policy, depending on the Insurer's Participating Fund (a.k.a. Par Fund) investment returns of 3.75% or 5.25%.

Currently, it seems the industry standard has lowered the illustration for returns of 3.25% and 4.75%.

As the the Cash Value of these illustration can only be realised only if the underlying Par Fund achieve at least those returns, I set to find out the past performance of the different Par Funds for the more common insurers.

First, I present the Par Fund's Expense Ratio, extracted from comparefirst.sg.

		2011	2012	2013	2014	Average
AIA			0.12%	0.13%	0.10%	0.12%
Tokio Marine			0.12%	0.11%	0.10%	0.11%
Great Eastern		0.21%	0.22%	0.23%		0.22%
NTUC Income			0.153%	0.147%	0.160%	0.15%
Manulife		0.17%	0.17%	0.17%		0.17%
Prudential			0.27%	0.27%	0.26%	0.27%

Next, I have collected the individual year performance of each insurer's Par Fund and obtained the following cummulative performance from beginning of year 2005:

	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	CAGR
AIA	100%	101.7%	108.2%	114.9%	102.0%	115.4%	123.7%	124.8%	137.1%	138.4%		3.68%
Tokio Marine	100%	113.2%	130.8%	146.8%	121.6%	146.0%	155.8%	154.7%	171.0%	175.0%	186.3%	5.76%
Great  Eastern	100%	105.0%	113.8%	126.2%	112.0%	122.6%	130.7%	132.7%	145.7%	151.0%		4.68%
NTUC Income	100%	106.8%	118.3%	131.0%	116.5%	130.4%	138.1%	136.9%	148.6%	151.1%	159.3%	4.21%
Manulife	100%	103.5%	119.8%	131.1%	119.8%	139.7%	149.9%	148.5%	164.4%	162.8%		5.57%
Prudential	100%	107.4%	122.2%	133.0%	101.2%	124.9%	133.9%	134.1%	148.9%	156.6%	165.9%	4.59%

From the above data, it is clear that why Tokio Marine is the only insurer in Singapore to have honoured their bonus projections for the past 66 years.