http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/05/ ... tHeadlines
Mr. and Mrs. Watanabe Take An Aussie-Dollar ‘Dream Cruise’
By Eleanor Warnock
Reuters
As the Bank of Japan floods the country with easy money, Mr. and Mrs. Watanabe are taking an Aussie-dollar dream cruise.
The proverbial Japanese couple aren’t boarding a luxury cruise ship, though. They’re piling onto another boat: Japan’s first Australian dollar-denominated life insurance product–the Dream Cruise–offered by Mitsui Life Insurance Co., one of the country’s largest life insurers.
The new product was prompted by Japan’s rock-bottom interest rates, said Naoyuki Yamazaki, general manager of Mitsui Life’s profits center and product department. “With yen-denominated products, we can only offer our customers an assumed interest rate of somewhere between 1% and 1.5%,” he said.
The Dream Cruise offers much sunnier prospects. Buyers of the basic package pay 165.60 Australian dollars (US$164) a month, which Mitsui Life manages in Australian assets. The company currently guarantees a 3.2% interest rate, which is adjusted automatically every 15 years, based on the prevailing rate on 10-year Australian government bonds, with a minimum 2.5%.
Mitsui Life began offering the Dream Cruise on April 1. Mr. Yamazaki wouldn’t reveal sales figures but did say they’ve topped forecasts. “Since it’s a new product, we thought we’d see a gradual increase in sales, but the increase has been pretty steep,” he said.
Mr. Yamazaki said the company settled on Australian dollars because the country offers higher rates than the U.S., and Japanese customers are also familiar with Australia through tourism and the two countries’ economic ties. Now that it has set sail with its first foreign-currency product, Mr. Yamazaki said, Mitsui Life plans to roll out similar products in the future.
And the name? “We wanted something about a dream, and since it’s our first foreign currency-denominated product, something about making a new start. Hence, Dream Cruise.”
