eFinancialCareers

Either insurance is the place to be in financial services at the moment or those who work in the industry are hopelessly optimistic. A new survey suggests that more than half of them think their bonus will equal or exceed last year’s.

GRS Group, a recruitment company, polled 600 insurance practitioners from the US, Latin America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. 52% of them reckoned bonuses in 2008 will at least be in line with last year. Presumably, the 10% of respondents who said they expected their bonuses to double aren’t in the UK.

Simon Crabb, head of UK insurance at GRS, says that insurance is proving resilient despite the downturn and that those working in the industry are more optimistic about bonuses than the current darlings of the financial crisis, those in risk management, legal, and tax.

“The insurance industry’s expectation around their bonus packages is an island of relative optimism in a sea of otherwise gloomy bonus forecasts,” he says.

Still, not all insurers are sanguine over bonus payouts: 28% of respondents said they expected nothing.

Andrew Kail, UK insurance leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers, says the survey’s findings are surprising, given that the insurance industry hasn’t had a particularly successful year.

“The non-life sector underwriting performance has been marginally worse as the cycle softened, the life companies have seen falling demand for their product as a result of a slowdown in the property market and a lack of investment appetite from individuals, and investment performance, which is so crucial to profitability, has fallen as the markets have fallen,” says Kail.

This being the case, he predicts insurance bonuses will fall. If they do, 50% of insurance professionals will be in for a shock.