NCB Insurance Company (NCBIC) has been awarded “Pension Fund of the Year” for the Caribbean in 2010 by the World Finance magazine, the second consecutive year that the National Commercial Bank subsidiary has won the award.

NCBIC general manager Ann-Marie Hamilton has attributed the outstanding performance to “the strategic decision to focus on cost containment during the year which saw certain job functions and business processes being integrated and centralised within the group to achieve greater efficiency.”

Among the different cost containment measures in 2010, NCBIC’s information technology function was fully integrated into the NCB Group IT function, Hamilton told Sunday Finance.

“While this was geared at cost containment, it was also intended to take greater advantage of the best practices across the group and to better leverage the expertise within the group. This was a continuation of other such initiatives starting with the integration of NCBIC’s marketing and human resource management functions with the corresponding NCB Group Function in 2008,” she said.

Hamilton also noted the growth achieved by the company was due to the management of interest spreads, the high level of talent harnessed and trained by the company and a very aggressive pricing policy for the growth and retention of market share.

As the insurance arm of the award-winning banking group, NCBIC manages a highly diversified pension portfolio offering trustees investments in equities, government securities, real estate, mortgages, leases and insurance premium financing. This diversification of assets allows the company to efficiently manage the liability profile of its client’s pension funds.

Like all similar entities in Jamaica, NCBIC was primarily affected by the JDX through the reduction of interest income, which accounted for the largest share of the company’s revenues. As a result, Hamilton explained that the company had to make some strategic adjustments.

“In anticipating and planning for the impact in the short and medium term, our initial adjustments included speeding up the pace on initiatives to increase revenues from non-interest sensitive products. Hence we increased our focus on selling more pure insurance products (eg ProCare, ProVision) among other tactical moves. We have continued along this path, also increasing focus on the sale of annuities and our individual retirement plan SMART,” she said.

NCBIC demonstrates its strength through a Solvency Ratio of 28.3 per cent which exceeds the minimum requirement of 10 per cent stipulated by the Financial Services Commission. The company currently has a workforce of 100 employees serving both lines of business — Insurance and Pensions — and Hamilton said its primary expansion plan is to increase the size of its sales team “…to establish a larger footprint in the market and increase market penetration.”

World Finance is a leading United Kingdom-based financial magazine which World News Media produces from its global Headquarters in London, England. The awards were created in 2007 to identify industry leaders, individuals, teams and organisations that represent the benchmark of achievement and best practice in the financial and business world.