Founded in Germany in 1983 by Dr. Manfred Dirrheimer, “FWU – Forward You” is a European multinational financial services provider with headquarters in Munich. FWU has established itself in international markets and today, under the brand name "Forward You", provides innovative investment products in Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, as well as in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. FWU´s core business is to provide unit-linked life insurance products, which are offered by the fully licensed life insurance companies of the FWU, FWU Life Insurance Lux S.A. and FWU Life Insurance Austria AG.

The group holding company, FWU AG, is still majority-owned by the Dirrheimer family, with Swiss Re Europe S.A. holding a 5%-stake in the company. FWU employs around 500 people and is represented at 10 locations worldwide.
In Europe FWU Life and FWU Invest service 275 k customers and manage over 2 billion € AuM and 9 billion € total contribution. All global insurance companies of FWU together service 1 million individual customers.

FWU expanded its home markets by starting to sell products in France 1997, in Italy 2006, in Spain 2014 and Belgium in 2017. Having gone through ongoing transformations, organic growth, and M&A transactions in 2016, FWU introduced for its 25 group companies the umbrella brand "FWU – Forward You." According to Dr. Manfred Dirrheimer himself in an official interview, this was a re-branding operation motivated by the need to unite the group under a common promise to all our customers as a result of our rapid expansion. Following years of historic results, leading to the doubling of clients in few years ahead.

Since then FWU has developed the awarded Pan-European Forward Quant product strategy, offering quant-based investments via UCIT funds and transparent fixed-price guarantees for its customers. Since its launch in 2018 50 k customers have decided for a Forward Quant policy.

Already in 2005 FWU developed the digital advice tool FILOS, back then for banks. Many revisions and improvements later it was launched in Europe in 2016 in Italy and rolled out to each individual sales agents in Europe until 2019. FILOS ensures a documented, highly individualised and guided selling process. It offers the possibility to meet clients or have remote selling sessions between agents and customers. In 2021 80 % of all contracts in Europe are signed electronically, 55 % without a physical meeting.

In 2018, FWU completed the acquisition of a life insurance technology platform with the intention to consolidate and standardize tech operations across FWU. Additionally, the so-called FWU TECH entity is meant to add speed, agility, and scale to FWU’s continued expansion plans.

FWU´s technological know-how enabled the group to face and overcome the year 2020, the year of the global crisis due to Covid19, in the best possible way: in just a few weeks FWU managed to develop a digital solution for remote advisory and digital signature of contracts that allowed agents and customers to continue to use FWU´s insurance products remotely. From the consultation to the online signature: all the steps necessary to take out a life insurance policy were done from the safety and comfort of home.

Find here a summary of our FWU company introduction and history.

FWU's mission has remained the same since 1983: develop products that are performing and individually tailored to each of our customers. Saving can be simple. Our product offer varies depending on each market, but here you can find information on all of them.

The last two years have been exciting ones for FWU - find all news combined for download as well as the latest press release below. In the case that you are searching for another event or product release and are not able to find the corresponding press release, please contact us.

Fitch Ratings has affirmed Luxembourg-based FWU Life Insurance Lux S.A.'s (FWU Lux) Insurer Financial Strength (IFS) Rating at 'BBB+' and Long-Term Issuer Default Rating (IDR) at 'BBB'.