Growth to 1914

Expansion into Germany

The Rentenanstalt looked beyond Switzerland within a decade of its foundation. The Swiss market was small, and a life insurer's security grows with the number of lives it insures, because the law of large numbers makes mortality more predictable in a larger portfolio. On 10 September 1866 Widmer obtained a concession to conduct business in the Kingdom of Prussia.¹ Swiss Life's group history places a branch in Germany and an agency in Istanbul in the same year. English Wikipedia adds that the company established operations in Hamburg and Bremen by 1867.² The German market, with its large and prosperous middle class, soon became the most important foreign field of the company.

The expansion to Germany set a pattern that shaped the Rentenanstalt for the next century. A Swiss mutual, with a reputation for solidity, sold its policies to German customers through branches and agents, invested part of the German reserves in Germany and part in Switzerland and competed with large domestic German insurers. The German business brought scale, but it also brought exposure to German law, German politics and, as the twentieth century would show, the German currency. When the Netherlands were added as a further market in 1900, the company had become an international life insurer with its head office in Zurich.³

Insurance for the people

The change of name in 1894 accompanied a social innovation. In that year the Rentenanstalt introduced insurance for lower-income groups, the so-called Volksversicherung, which had been developed in Britain and Germany as industrial or people's insurance. Swiss Life's historical account attributes the initiative to Emil Frey, who had become director in 1892 on the retirement of Widmer. The small premiums of workers and employees could not be collected economically by agents calling at each house. The company therefore allowed customers to pay by sticking postage stamps on collecting cards, a method that the HLS also records for the early years of the business.⁴ The department was led for decades by Mathilde Pfenninger, who, according to the same account, employed only women and had 130 female employees by the time of her retirement.

The people's insurance was a modest business in terms of sums insured, but it had considerable social and political importance. A study of private insurance in the history of Swiss social security notes that products designed specifically for the working-class milieu expanded rapidly before the First World War, while still covering only a small part of the population.⁵ For the Rentenanstalt, the business demonstrated that life insurance could serve more than the propertied middle class. It also gave the private insurers an argument in the debates about social insurance that began at the end of the century: private provision, they maintained, could reach wide sections of the population without compulsion by the state.

Swiss Life's own chronology dates the first policy of the people's insurance to 7 August 1894 and records more than 3,000 policyholders five months later. The anniversary magazine adds a further innovation of the same year: in 1894 the Rentenanstalt was one of the first insurers in Germany to offer disability insurance (Berufsunfähigkeitsversicherung).⁶ English Wikipedia describes the Rentenanstalt as one of the first insurers to offer occupational cover from 1894. The year thus marks the moment at which the company broadened its range from classic life and annuity insurance towards the protection of working income.

Offices, taxes and the Insurance Contract Act

The company's premises reflected its growth. After its first years near Paradeplatz, the Rentenanstalt moved in 1876 into the Chamhaus at the Obere Zäune in the old town. In 1899 it moved again, to a new building at the Alpenquai near the lake, which remained the head office until 1940.⁷ The location of the head office almost became a political issue. Swiss Life records that in 1888 the company nearly moved its seat to Brugg in the canton of Aargau because of a tax dispute. The episode is an early example of a pattern that the Zurich financial centre knows well. Large financial institutions have always been mobile, and the cantons that host them have had to weigh fiscal demands against the risk of losing them.⁸

By the first decade of the twentieth century, the Swiss life insurance market was large enough to justify a federal law on the insurance contract itself. The Federal Act on the Insurance Contract (Versicherungsvertragsgesetz, VVG) was adopted on 2 April 1908.⁹ The Act, which entered into force on 1 January 1910, codified the rights and duties of insurer and policyholder, including the rules on beneficiary clauses, surrender values and the protection of family beneficiaries against creditors that are discussed in Section IX below.¹⁰ The rules of 1908 governing the life insurance policy have survived, with amendments, into the present, which makes the VVG one of the oldest codifications still in force in Swiss financial law.

On the eve of the First World War the Rentenanstalt was the leading Swiss life insurer, a mutual company with a large German business, an established people's insurance department, a presence in the Netherlands and a head office by the lake in Zurich. It had outgrown the guarantee of its founding bank, set the standards of the domestic industry and supplied the first director of the insurers' association. It had also tied its fortunes to the German market to an extent that would prove costly in the years that followed.

Notes

1. Swiss Life Deutschland, “Geschichte”, https://www.swisslife.de/ueber-swiss-life/unternehmen/geschichte.html, which dates the concession for the Royal Prussian states to 10 September 1866. ↩
2. Wikipedia, “Swiss Life”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Life. Cited for orientation on the Prussian licence of 1866, the Hamburg and Bremen business of 1867, the conversion of 1997 under Manfred Zobl, the acquisitions of 1999, the sale of Banca del Gottardo in 2007 and the acquisition of AWD in 2008. ↩
3. Swiss Life Group, “When premiums were still paid with stamps” (cited above), which records the start of business in the Netherlands in 1900. ↩
4. Swiss Life Group, “When premiums were still paid with stamps” (cited above), on Emil Frey's appointment as director in 1892, the introduction of people's insurance in 1894, the payment by postage stamps on collecting cards and the department led for decades by Mathilde Pfenninger. ↩
5. Geschichte der Sozialen Sicherheit in der Schweiz, “Private Versicherungen und Hilfsvereine”, https://www.geschichtedersozialensicherheit.ch/institutionen/kassenwesen/private-versicherungen-und-hilfsvereine. The page describes the expansion of people's insurance before 1914, the group insurance through which employers delegated their pension arrangements to life insurers and the strategy of complementarity between private and public provision after 1918. ↩
6. Swiss Life Group, “Our history”, https://www.swisslife.com/en/home/about-us/our-history.html, which presents the introduction of public insurance as a milestone and states: “The first policy was concluded on 7 August 1894 and five months later there were already over 3000 policyholders.” Swiss Life, Das Magazin zum Jubiläum (2007), https://www.swisslife.com/content/dam/com/site/aboutus/history/Jubilaeumsmagazin_D.PDF: “1894 bietet die Rentenanstalt in Deutschland als einer der ersten Versicherer die Berufsunfähigkeits-Versicherung an.” ↩
7. Swiss Life, Das Magazin zum Jubiläum (cited above), which gives the Chamhaus at the Obere Zäune as the headquarters from 1876 to 1899 and Alpenquai 40 from 1899 to 1940. ↩
8. Swiss Life Group, “When premiums were still paid with stamps” (cited above), which records that in 1888 the company almost moved its headquarters to Brugg in the canton of Aargau because of a tax dispute. ↩
9. VVG, SR 221.229.1 (cited above), title and date of the Act: “Bundesgesetz über den Versicherungsvertrag vom 2. April 1908”. ↩
10. Peter Gauch, “Das Versicherungsvertragsgesetz – alt und revisionsbedürftig”, https://www.unifr.ch/ius/stoeckli/de/assets/public/files/publications/PublikationenPeterGauch/DasVersicherungsvertragsgesetzaltundrevisionsbeduerftig.pdf: “Als es am 1. 1. 1910 in Kraft gesetzt wurde, hatten weder das ZGB noch das revidierte Obligationenrecht Gesetzeskraft.” ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.