Allianz

Allianz SE (/ˈæliənts/ AL-ee-ənts, German: [aˈli̯ants] ^ⓘ) is a German multinational financial services company headquartered in Munich, Germany. Its core businesses are insurance and asset management.

Allianz is the world's largest insurance company and the largest financial services company in Europe. In 2023, the company was ranked 37th in the Forbes Global 2000. Also it is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index.

Its asset management division, which consists of PIMCO and Allianz Global Investors, has €2,432 billion of assets under management (AUM), of which €1,775 billion are third-party assets (Q1 2021).

Allianz sold Dresdner Bank to Commerzbank in November 2008. Allianz was a major supporter of the Nazi movement and was an insurer of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Allianz AG was founded in Munich in 1889, but started its activities in Berlin on 5 February 1890, by the then-director of the Munich Reinsurance Company Carl von Thieme (a native of Erfurt, whose father was the director of the Thuringia insurance company) and Wilhelm von Finck (co-owner of the Merck Finck & Co. Bank). The joint company was listed in Berlin's trade register under the name Allianz Versicherungs-Aktiengesellschaft. The company was established with a start-up capital of 4 million marks. The first Allianz products were marine and accident policies that were initially sold only in Germany. However, in 1893, Allianz opened its first international branch office in London, distributing marine insurance coverage to German clientele looking for coverage abroad.

In 1900, the company became the first insurer to obtain a license to distribute corporate policies. In 1904, Paul von Naher took over the sole leadership of the company, as it moved into the US and other markets. Markets entered by 1914 included the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, France, the Scandinavian countries and the Baltic states, and Allianz had become the largest maritime insurer in Germany. The company suffered an early disaster in expansion when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake caused the company to sustain 300,000 marks in losses. In 1905, the company acquired Fides Insurance Company, a firm that had innovated the first form of home invasion insurance. Other places expanded into during the 1910s and 1920s included Palestine, Cyprus, Iraq, China, the Dutch Indies (now Indonesia), Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Siam (now Thailand).

In 1905, the company began to offer fire insurance, and in 1911 it began to sell machinery breakdown policies. Allianz remained the only company in the world that sold machine breakdown insurance until 1924. In 1918, it began offering automobile insurance as well through a joint venture called Kraft Versicherungs-AG. In 1921, Von Naher died and was succeeded by Kurt Schmitt. The company would begin to offer life insurance as of 1922, becoming Europe's largest offerer of the policies by the end of the 1920s.

In 1927, Allianz merged with Stuttgarter Verein Versicherung AG, which was then the leading accident and third-party liability insurer. Two years later, it acquired the insurance businesses of Favag, a large German insurer that declared bankruptcy due to the onset of the Great Depression. Expansion of the company then slowed until 1938 at which point it employed more than 24,000 people. Christian Stadler wrote of the history of Allianz that it "shows how important it is to diversify into related areas to hedge against the risk of fundamental changes in markets and economies".