By Jean Eaglesham
Aegon, the Dutch insurer and asset manager, is joining the stream of European companies moving stateside as it seeks to tap into the booming U.S. life and retirement market.
Aegon is renaming itself after its biggest business, Transamerica, it said Wednesday. It has owned the U.S. insurer since 1999, when it bought the business for $9.7 billion.
"Transamerica is already 70% of our operations -- we're leaning into that reality," Aegon Chief Executive Lard Friese said in an interview. "We need to make the U.S. truly our home market."
The insurer adds to a growing list of European companies refocusing on the U.S. -- a shift that the continent's leaders view as an emergency.
Some, such as the plumbing-supplies company Ferguson Enterprises, have moved their corporate headquarters to the U.S., while others are moving listings or taking other steps to appeal to U.S. investors. This fall, for instance, drugmaker AstraZeneca said it plans to list shares directly on the New York Stock Exchange.
Shares in Aegon fell nearly 8% in Amsterdam on Wednesday, as investors absorbed the cost implications of the complicated reorganization.
The company expects the two-year shift of its head office and legal base to the U.S. to rack up a one-off cost of around EUR350 million, the equivalent of about $407 million. A big chunk of that cost is due to a change to a U.S. accounting base, making it easier for analysts and investors to compare the company to its U.S. insurance peers, Friese said.
Aegon's shares will remain listed in both the U.S. and Europe, but Friese said he expects over time its stock will mostly be traded in New York. America's "deep and broad" capital markets aren't the main driver of the move, but there are "a lot of attractions to the U.S. marketplace, " he added.
Aegon said its ambition is to become a leading player in the U.S. life-insurance market, the world's biggest. Sales of insurance and retirement products have surged since the pandemic, and demand is expected to stay strong as the population ages.
Transamerica uses an army of 92,000 agents to pitch products to middle America. It ranked tenth for sales of individual life-insurance policies in the nine months through September, according to industry-funded research firm Limra.
Write to Jean Eaglesham at Jean.Eaglesham@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 10, 2025 08:12 ET (13:12 GMT)
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