The foundation of the Rentenanstalt in 1857

Conrad Widmer

Johann Conrad Widmer was born on 16 July 1818 in Altnau in the canton of Thurgau, the son of a physician. He studied theology at the University of Zurich in 1836 and 1837 and law at the University of Basel from 1837 to 1839. After receiving his licence as an advocate in Frauenfeld in 1839, he opened a practice there and worked for a time as domestic editor of the Thurgauer Zeitung. He then became chief clerk of the court, deputy public prosecutor in Frauenfeld and school inspector. From 1852 to 1857 he directed the Oetenbach penal institution in Zurich.¹ The career of the founder of the first Swiss life insurer thus led through the law, journalism and public administration. That a man without a commercial or banking background created so durable an institution is one of the notable features of its history.

Widmer's biography helps to explain the character of the Rentenanstalt. A lawyer who had run a prison administration understood governance, records and accountability. A former theology student and school inspector brought a sense of social purpose. Swiss Life's own account of its history records that Widmer began to explore the idea of a Swiss life insurance company in 1855.² The Historisches Lexikon adds a detail of institutional significance: the cantonal government of Zurich had initiated the project, and Widmer carried out the preparatory work.³ The Rentenanstalt was therefore born of a public initiative, carried out by a former cantonal official and financed by the new private bank of the Escher circle. This mixture of public purpose and private capital was characteristic of Zurich in the 1850s.

The guarantee of the Kreditanstalt

The legal and financial construction of the new company was unusual. The Rentenanstalt was established as an institution of private law to provide annuity, life and death insurance, and it began its business without any start-up capital of its own. The Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, founded a year earlier, acted as founder because it guaranteed the obligations of the new institution. Swiss Life's anniversary release of 2007 states that the Kreditanstalt, founded by Alfred Escher, who had known Widmer since their school days, guaranteed the new company with its entire equity capital.⁴ Escher himself sat on the supervisory board of the Rentenanstalt from 1857 to 1874, as Chapter D.II has shown.

The guarantee solved the central problem of any new life insurer. A policyholder who pays premiums for thirty or forty years needs to trust that the company will still exist when the claim falls due. A newly founded mutual without capital could not inspire that confidence. The Kreditanstalt, with the largest capital of any Swiss bank and the prestige of the Escher network behind it, could. The arrangement also served the bank. The premiums collected by the Rentenanstalt had to be invested, and the bank that stood behind the insurer was well placed to advise on, and to place, the securities in which those reserves were held. In the language of the crédit mobilier model that the Kreditanstalt followed, the insurer was one of the new companies that a promoting bank created in order to mobilise savings for the capital market.

The Swiss Re brochure on the history of Swiss insurance puts the relationship in simple terms: in 1857 Conrad Widmer founded the Schweizerische Rentenanstalt, today Swiss Life, with the support of Alfred Escher.⁵ The HLS article on insurance adds a structural observation. It links the emergence of Swiss life insurers directly to the founding of the Kreditanstalt, which made the mobilisation of sufficient capital possible for the first time.⁶ The dependence of Swiss insurance on Swiss banking, and the cluster of both in Zurich, thus dates from the very first year of the industry.

The first policies

The new company opened for business in a small building near Paradeplatz with five employees.⁷ German Wikipedia gives 21 November 1857 as the date of foundation.⁸ The first policy followed at the beginning of the new year. According to the magazine that Swiss Life published for its hundred and fiftieth anniversary, it was issued on 6 January 1858 to Johann Conrad Heim, a merchant from St. Gallen, for a sum payable on death of 14,500 francs. Widmer signed the early insurance certificates personally, since they had to be completed by hand.⁹

The business of the first full year shows the range of the new institution. The same magazine counts 16 annuity policies, 242 endowment policies and 192 policies payable on death for 1858. It also records that in that same year the canton of Zurich insured all its public schoolteachers with the Rentenanstalt, which Swiss Life regards as its first group insurance. The link with the cantonal government that had initiated the project was thus immediately visible in the business. It also anticipated the line of business that would, a century later, dominate the company: collective insurance for the employees of an employer, which is today the core of the Swiss occupational pension system.

The balance between annuities and capital insurance that the first year revealed also foreshadowed a later development. Although the founders had placed annuities in the name of the company, the demand for capital sums payable on death or on survival to a fixed age proved much larger. The HLS notes that this predominance of capital insurance over annuities led, in 1894, to the change of name to Schweizerische Lebensversicherungs- und Rentenanstalt.¹⁰ The customers of the nineteenth century wanted, above all, to protect their families against the death of the breadwinner and to accumulate savings for a dowry, a business or old age. The insurance endowment, which combined both purposes, became the characteristic product of the Swiss life insurer.

Notes

1. HLS, Christian Baertschi, “Widmer, Johann Conrad”, version of 29.10.2013, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/030969/2013-10-29/. The article gives Widmer's dates, his studies, his career in Thurgau and his directorship of the Oetenbach penal institution from 1852 to 1857. ↩
2. Swiss Life Group, “When premiums were still paid with stamps”, https://www.swisslife.com/en/home/blog/geschichte-swiss-life.html. The article dates Widmer's first exploration of the idea to 1855 and records the later developments cited in this chapter, including the revision of the articles in 1879, the mutual status of 1885 and Widmer's retirement in 1892. ↩
3. HLS, Bernard Degen, “Rentenanstalt”, version of 2010, edited 30.10.2025, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/041816/. The article states that the Zurich cantonal government initiated the project, that Widmer did the preparatory work and that the Kreditanstalt acted as founder because it guaranteed the operations of an institution that began without start-up capital. ↩
4. Swiss Life Group, “150 years of Swiss Life”, media release of 16 January 2007, https://www.swisslife.com/en/home/media/media-releases/news-archiv/20070116a.html. The release describes the Rentenanstalt as the first national life insurance company under Swiss law, locates its first office near Paradeplatz and states that the Kreditanstalt guaranteed it with its entire equity capital. ↩
5. Swiss Re, Geschichte der Versicherung in der Schweiz (cited above), which states that Widmer founded the Rentenanstalt in 1857 with the support of Alfred Escher and names six further Swiss life insurers established between 1858 and 1878. ↩
6. HLS, Körner and Degen, “Versicherungen” (cited above), which connects the foundation of domestic life insurers with the founding of the Kreditanstalt and names the Rentenanstalt (1857), La Suisse (1858) and the Basler Lebensversicherungs-Gesellschaft (1864). ↩
7. Swiss Life Group, “Our history”, https://www.swisslife.com/en/home/about-us/our-history.html. The page records the foundation in 1857, the five employees in a small building near Paradeplatz, Widmer's directorship until 1892, the expansion to Germany and Istanbul in 1866, the move to a new building near the lake in 1899, the portfolio of 164,458 policies in 1932, the move to the General-Guisan-Quai in 1940, the conversion into a company limited by shares in 1997, the inclusion of the shares in the SMI in 1998 and the new brand of 2004. ↩
8. Wikipedia (German), “Swiss Life”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Life. Cited for orientation on the date of foundation, the number of members at the time of the conversion in 1997 and several later transactions. ↩
9. Swiss Life, Das Magazin zum Jubiläum (2007), https://www.swisslife.com/content/dam/com/site/aboutus/history/Jubilaeumsmagazin_D.PDF. The magazine records the first policy of 6 January 1858, the business of the first year, the group insurance of the Zurich schoolteachers in 1858, the headquarters at the Chamhaus from 1876 and at the Alpenquai from 1899 and the oldest surviving company contracts of 1918. ↩
10. HLS, Degen, “Rentenanstalt” (cited above), on the change of name in 1894, the insurance for lower-income groups introduced in the same year with premiums initially collected by means of postage stamps, and the expansion abroad in the 1920s. ↩

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.