Taiwan’s life insurance industry recorded NT$233.495 billion in new premium revenues from foreign-currency denominated policies in the first five months of 2026, a 54% year-on-year increase from NT$151.444 billion over the same period of 2025, according to data published July 28 by the Insurance Bureau of Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC).
The growth rate is the more analytically significant figure. For the full year 2025, new foreign-currency premium revenues reached NT$418.918 billion, up 30% from NT$322.661 billion year-on-year. The 54% recorded through May 2026 is nearly double that full-year pace – and it outstrips every monthly data point the FSC published across 2025, which opened at 11% year-on-year through January before climbing through subsequent months. The May 2026 reading represents the steepest growth rate in the current expansion cycle.
Within the total, investment-linked insurance products generated NT$45.604 billion through May 2026, representing approximately 20% of new foreign-currency premiums – up 105% year-on-year from NT$22.260 billion in the same period of 2025. The contrast with 2025 benchmarks is significant on both dimensions. Through the full year 2025, investment-linked products accounted for NT$70.322 billion, or around 17% of total new foreign-currency premiums, rising 41% year-on-year from NT$49.814 billion.
The 105% growth rate through May 2026 is more than double the equivalent full-year 2025 rate for the same segment, and the investment-linked share of total new foreign-currency premiums has widened from 17% across 2025 to 20% through May 2026. Traditional insurance products retain their dominant position at NT$187.891 billion – roughly 80% of the total – up 45% year-on-year from NT$129.184 billion.
The sector-level acceleration is corroborated by disclosures from individual carriers. Fubon Financial Holdings, in its 2025 annual investor conference press release published in March 2026, reported that strong sales of USD-denominated participating products at Fubon Life increased the share of foreign-currency policies from 41.2% to 51.9% during 2025, enhancing asset-liability currency matching. The agency channel recorded 17% growth in first-year premiums, while the bancassurance channel continued to focus on instalment-payment products, with proprietary channels accounting for 72.6% of first-year premiums overall. Separately, data from Fitch Ratings’ November 2025 review noted that Cathay Life’s USD-denominated policies comprised 62% of its first-year premiums in the first nine months of 2025, as the insurer worked to mitigate FX risk by increasing sales of USD-denominated policies, while Fubon Life reported that 60% of its first-year premiums during the same period were from USD-denominated policies.
The acceleration in investment-linked volumes arrives alongside sustained regulatory attention on the conduct aspects of that growth. The FSC has issued guidance stating that investment-oriented insurance contracts combine life insurance coverage with exposure to financial markets, and that the insurance element does not remove the possibility of losses arising from asset performance. The regulator encouraged policyholders not to base purchase decisions solely on recent returns or prevailing market sentiment and to assess whether they can tolerate potential losses linked to both asset prices and currency fluctuations. For compliance and product teams, those expectations apply with particular force as investment-linked volumes post their sharpest growth in the current cycle.
The premium growth data coincide with a fundamental shift in how Taiwan’s life insurance sector manages foreign exchange exposure. Taiwanese life insurers’ allocations to foreign investments represented approximately 70% of the sector’s overall portfolio as of year-end 2024, according to the Taiwan Insurance Institute, with investment leverage relative to capital and surplus as high as tenfold. Following the New Taiwan dollar’s sharp appreciation in May 2025, the FSC overhauled accounting rules to allow life insurers to spread exchange-rate gains and losses over time for bonds measured at amortized cost – a change estimated to save US$2.9 billion annually in hedging costs – stating that under current standards, short-term exchange-rate movements had caused significant volatility in reported earnings even though most were unrealized, according to Taipei Times. Those provisions took effect from fiscal year 2026. The sector’s hedging ratio had fallen to 58.55% by the end of October 2025, the lowest level since the FSC began tracking the data in 2020. The FSC release covers new business only and does not include in-force policy figures or renewal premiums.
