Aegon has received approval from the regulatory authorities in Poland for the planned merger of its pension fund management company PTE Aegon with BRE Bank’s PTE Skarbiec-Emerytura.
[node:field_featured_media:entity:field_media_image]As part of the merger agreement, Aegon will acquire BRE Bank’s shareholding in the newly combined pension fund. This process is expected to be complete before the end of 2008.
The merger, agreed in June last year, will strengthen Aegon’s position both in the Polish pension market and in the Central and Eastern European region as a whole.
With the merger, Aegon will become Poland’s fifth largest pension fund manager, with a market share of approximately 6%. The fund has some 800,000 members and more than EUR 1.8 billion in assets under management. Aegon has been present in Poland since 2005 and has both pension and life insurance activities in the country.
Aegon sees Central and Eastern Europe as an important source of future growth and over recent years the Group has expanded its operations in the region. Currently Aegon has businesses in five countries – Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Poland – and in February this year announced a new acquisition in Turkey. At present, Aegon pension funds in Central and Eastern Europe have a total of 1.9 million members.