How Many Transamerica’s Are There?
According to Wikipedia: “The Transamerica Corporation is an American holding company for various life insurance companies and investment firms operating primarily in the United States”, but is the answer that simple?
Founded in 1928 as a holding company by A.P. Giannini, the Transamerica became a diversified conglomerate with several subsidiaries taking on the Transamerica name. Later in the 80’s the corporation divested to focus on financial services. In 1999, Aegon, an insurer based in Netherlands acquired the company and uses its name for trade purposes.
Is the World Financial Group (WFG) the same thing as Transamerica?
The WFG is a MLM (Multi-level-marketing) financial company that is now fully owned by Aegon. It was originally founded as World Marketing Alliance by Hubert Humphrey after he left Primerica in 1991. This explains the similarity in marketing style with Primerica and the Transamerica namesake. Coincidence or not Transamerica is widely known for its symbolic headquarters the “Transamerica Pyramid”.
Do agents at Transamerica and WFG earn a salary?
This blog places them both in the same boat with Primerica as pyramid scheme like MLM structured businesses which promise riches, pay no salary and offer a commission while encouraging agents to bring on more sub-agents to increase their revenue. It is very hard to find official information about these companies structures and practices, but reddit posts like this one by previous employees seem to affirm that bloggers claims and recommend staying far away.
This quote really says it all. (Reddit)
Does the WFG have a disproportionate number of Asian agents?
Some sources claim that the WFG targets people of Asian ethnicity and background when recruiting. Judging by the amount of articles in Chinese warning people to stay away from WFG, such a this one, that can be found online there is likely some truth to the claim. On the other hand, the list of employees on LinkedIn shows a diversified staff. As to why that is the case , there is no clear-cut answer, and it may or may not be intentional. One possibility is that they were preying on immigrant fragility and desire to become rich. This combined with the close nit , relationship based culture of the Chinese and Asian community may have contributed to the proliferation of agents from that group.
What is Transamerica Agency Network?
Transamerica Agency Network is somewhat of a mystery. With “businesswire” writing about it being established in 2012 and Bloomberg saying it was incorporated as early as 2006, it is unclear exactly how and why it came into being. The few sources that do exist say it was originally created by combining the career agents of Monumental Life Insurance Company and the independent agents of Life Investors Financial Group, Inc. under the Transamerica brand.
The Transamerica website now claims that:
”Transamerica Agency Network represents… Transamerica Life Insurance Company and Transamerica Premier Life Insurance Company.”
In practice it seems to be a unified front for agents peddling a wide variety of Transamerica’s and its subsidiaries products. There seems to be an intentional blurring of the lines between being a marketing agency or insurance agency, which may be indicative of how they choose to conduct their business.