Mutual of Omaha to Enter Banking
January 22nd, 2007 by Megan Mahan
According to an article via the Insurance Journal today, Mutual of Omaha has its sights set on market expansion–namely, banking.
The near 100-year old company could potentially market the new offerings to its existing policyholders. Which, at the end of 2005, included 1.5 million individual policyholders and more than 13,500 employer groups.
Mutual of Omaha president and CEO Jeff Schmid said the new offering would “be a base for extending electronic banking across the country.”
The operative word for the move, however, is “diversify.” By involving themselves in the banking market, Schmid added that they could broaden Mutual’s horizons for the future:
“We have the ability to build a company that complements Mutual over the next 10 or 20 years, that really has so much in common from a financial services standpoint.”
While the article notes that about three dozen other U.S. insurers have made the same move, I have yet to catch wind of it. Think in ten years we’ll all be banking with our insurer? Seems sort of strange, but not that far-fetched.
Personally, as a customer of Mutual of Omaha, I’ll be interested to see how they position the added feature to existing policyholders.
