From 1 December 2003, Elisabeth Stadler (42) will take over the seat of Karl Unger (50) on the management board of UNIQA Personenversicherung AG. She will assume responsibility for the management of UNIQA’s cross-border competence centre for life and accident insurance. From the beginning of December, the board of UNIQA Personenversicherung will be made up of Dr. Peter Eichler (chair and head of the competence centre for health insurance), Helmut Posch (exclusive sales) and Elisabeth Stadler (chair and head of the competence centre for life insurance).

Karl Unger will retain his seat on the board of the holding company, UNIQA Versicherungen AG, and lead the divisions of IT, company organization, company actuaries, customer service and quality management.  "My activities at UNIQA Personenversicherung were originally due to run for only two years. The arrival of Elisabeth Stadler means that my work in life and accident  insurance will be taken over by an extremely competent mathematician, who has been working within the company for many years," said Karl Unger.

As head of the competence centre for life and accident insurance, Stadler and her team are not only taking over responsibility for this large area of business in Austria. Directing the development of life and accident insurance in associated companies in Central and Eastern Europe is an equally growing challenge. “Our activities range from supporting product development to deciding which products will be introduced in which form and in which countries," explained Elisabeth Stadler. “In the future, we are going to concentrate - in the spirit of our harmonized company strategy - on the introduction of ‘European products’, which are in essence designed to be used between the Baltic and the Adriatic. Only specific facts, such as life expectancy tables and costs will be adjusted to the individual countries.”

For the Austrian domestic market, in which the UNIQA group holds a top position with a 21% market share in life insurance, Stadler expects growth in life insurance as a result of the worsening pensions crisis. “This development is also reflected by the growth in premium-supported long-term care, which is expected to reach a group-wide volume of more than 40,000 policies in 2003. In the near term, I can see increased opportunities in individual combinations of different products, in the sense of the frequently-quoted care pyramid.” Depending on personal circumstances, the customer will be able to choose from a range of options between security and guarantee and between risk cover and higher return. At the same time, Stadler also wants to offer customized products and product groups to younger people and other specific target groups.

Stadler predicts that Eastern Europe will have even more catching-up to do. “People know that there’s a pensions crisis, but the vast majority of them still fail to provide for their financial future with proper pension policies. At the moment, risk policies and the classic saving principle of endowment policies still prevail. I expect that private life insurance as a component of pension plans will quickly grow in the EU candidate countries, on which UNIQA is focussing as a regional target market.”

Over the last few years, Stadler has intensively studied the countries of Central Europe and their local distinctive features. She sees UNIQA's one-brand policy, which the company pursues in all its markets, as one of its greatest assets for the future. “Every time I see our logo at the airport in Prague, in the centre of Warsaw, on the motorway to Bratislava, on a high-rise in Budapest and on the way to Zagreb, it is a small indicator of the importance of our group, which stands for the same quality and goals across the whole region. It is this presence that endorses our employees’ and our customers’ decision to choose UNIQA.”

Elisabeth Stadler
Elisabeth Stadler was born in Langenlois, Lower Austria, in 1961, and still lives in the area with her husband. After completing her actuarial studies at the University of Technology, Vienna, she began her professional career at UNIQA’s predecessor, Bundesländer-Versicherung. Since then she has worked in life insurance with an emphasis on mathematics. Her work schedule is additionally filled with numerous lectures and leaves little time to her hobbies of sport, culture and regional wines.