Colombia

Axco provides details on the life insurance sector including Colombian market participants, reinsurance and distribution channels. The reports describe classes of business from both individual and group life such as whole life, endowment, term life and unit-linked.
Information on non-life classes for example critical illness and private medical insurance.

The report describes the public and private healthcare system in Colombia, the scope of cover, accessibility financing and provides an analysis of how the public and private systems complement each other.

Axco reports on the three pillars of Colombian pension provision.

• State pension benefits including benefit calculations and eligibility criteria 
• Workplace pension provision; types of schemes calculations eligibility and; tax implications
• Voluntary individual pension provision, type of products and tax implications

The Colombia report provides an in-depth analysis of the regulatory framework governing social security as well as details on financing and eligibility. Information includes but is not limited to

• state pensions,
• permanent disability benefit
• occupational accident and disease
• maternity and paternity payments 

The Colombian insurance market ranked 41st in the world in 2020 according to Axco Global Statistics, and 37th for life business where it was fourth in Latin America and the Caribbean behind Mexico, Brazil and Chile (33).

In round figures 2020 total market premium income was COP 31trn (USD 8.4bn). Life business (including workers' compensation, classed as such locally, and pensions) accounted for 43.4% of this, a contraction of 1.3% on prior year.

The government of President Duque elected in mid-2018 faced pension and healthcare reform as long-standing urgent issues. Its plans for the latter were shelved along with tax reforms following violent social protests against them from April 2021. Major changes to the state pension system also seemed unlikely to take place under that administration, though measures such as increases in the minimum age of eligibility for a pension and/or social security contributions could probably be justified from a technical viewpoint as in the longer-term interests of the state.

There had been talk of ending or gradually phasing out the state defined benefit pension system  ....

Law 100 of 1993 opened up the provision of public healthcare benefits, which had been a monopoly of ISS, to private sector health promotion providers (empresas promotoras de salud - EPSs), specialising in healthcare cover in competition with and on the same terms as the public sector. EPSs are not insurance companies, although insurers may be shareholders, historically regulated by the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare through the agency of the National Superintendency of Health (Supersalud/SNS), but Law 1966 of 11 July 2019 put in place an integrated system of control, inspection and oversight for the health sector involving not only Supersalud and SFC but also the Superintendency of Companies and that of Industry and Commerce ....