AIB Life joint venture appoints Bryan O’Connor as chief executive

AIB Life, the banking group’s new life and pensions joint venture with Canada Life Irish Holding Company, has appointed Bryan O’Connor as its chief executive as it prepares to launch products to customers in the coming months.

The venture, which is currently registered under the company name Saol Assurance DAC, has also named Tom Foley, a chartered accountant and former senior banker, as its chairman.

A spokesman confirmed the appointments when asked about them by The Irish Times on Friday, declining to comment further.

It is understood that AIB Life will be built up to have about 120 staff, expected to include employees from the wider AIB group, Canada Life, which is a sister company of Irish Life, as well as new hires. Canada Life and Irish Life are both part of Winnipeg-based Great-West Lifeco.

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AIB, under chief executive Colin Hunt, decided in late 2020 to get back into the life and pensions business, eight years after it put its former Ark Life unit into wind-down at the height of the financial crisis and became a tied agent for Irish Life products.

Irish Life bought Ark Life from London-based Phoenix Group for €230 million in cash in November 2021. Ark Life changed its legal name late last year to Irish Life Arc Dublin.

Mr O’Connor has been with AIB since 1990, initially working with Ark Life, but has spent most of its career working in the group’s wealth operations.

Mr Foley was a one-time senior executive at KBC Bank Ireland and the NatWest Group. He served as non-executive director at AIB between 2012 and 2020.

AIB and Canada Life received authorisation in principle in December for the joint venture before securing final approval more recently.

AIB committed in June 2021, when it agreed to set up the partnership, to investing €90 million in the 50:50 joint venture to cover its share of the set-up costs and regulatory capital required for the new business.

AIB receives about €20 million in commissions a year from its current arrangement with Irish Life. The new venture is expected to generate “multiples” of that amount for AIB within years, sources previously said.

However, it is believed that it the bank only expects AIB life to contribute to group earnings over the medium term.

Other deals carried out by AIB in recent years include its repurchase of Goodbody Stockbrokers in 2021, a decade after it sold the firm, and agreements to buy a total of about €9.5 billion of corporate and tracker mortgage loans from Ulster Bank, as the latter exits the market.

AIB will be expected to give more details on plans for the life joint venture next Wednesday with it reports full-year earnings.

AIB’s recent deal-making and, more importantly, rising interest rates globally prompted it to hike its medium-term profitability target in December. It now expects to post profit returns in 2024 equivalent to at least 13 per cent of tangible equity shareholders (RoTE) hold in the business.

That is up from a target of 9 per cent that the bank had previously set for 2023, which itself was double the return AIB delivered in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic.