Transamerica rebrands, renews focus on middle class

It’s not every day you find a 120-year-old company updating its brand to keep up with the times, but Transamerica leaders say they’ve always adjusted to customer needs.

The rebrand includes a new logo — a bright red has been added around the iconic pyramid tower — and includes new typography, visuals and a brand identity aimed at helping more middle-Income Americans access its financial products, tools and education.

Transamerica provides insurance and retirement products for workplaces and individuals, investment products and investment management services, for its 10 million customers, according to the company.

Transamerica and its parent company, AEGON, employ 8,000 people in the U.S. and Canada.

Transamerica, headquartered in Baltimore, has its largest U.S. operations in Denver and in Cedar Rapids.

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The company has been in Cedar Rapids since 1960. It moved its campus from Edgewood Road NE and Highway 100 to 6300 and 6400 C St. SW in 2020, spending $40 million to remodel and expand two buildings there. Some 2,000 employees work there today.

In 2023, the AEGON Transamerica Foundation contributed $2 million to charities in the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City Corridor, and its employees donated 5,652 volunteer hours.

“With the number of employees in Cedar Rapids, there have been many decades of important contributions,” Maurice Perkins, chief corporate affairs officer, told The Gazette. “Transamerica’s impact on Iowa includes more than $45 billion worth of insurance policies serving over 70,000 Iowa customers since the 1990s.”

Transamerica’s primary regulator is the Iowa Insurance Division, he said.

“This is a super exciting time for the company,” Perkins added. “The reasons we launched this more youthful look are, one, it has been a long time — maybe two decades — since our last refresh, and, two, it aligns well with our growth strategy to be the leader in life insurance and retirement products for middle-market Americans.

“We have worked for two years installing our new website look, including customer post login pages and our employee intranet across the U.S. We used both internal and external focus groups for rebranding.”

Will Fuller, president and CEO of Transamerica, said there are nearly 68 million middle-income households in the U.S. “that the financial services industry has relatively overlooked.”

The company said 42 percent of American adults “need (or need more) life insurance,” according to the LIMRA Insurance Barometer Study.

And only one in five people in the American middle class are “very confident” in their ability to fully retire or maintain a comfortable lifestyle throughout retirement, according to the Transamerica Institute.

Transamerica said it is already seeing results in efforts to reach younger demographics, with the average age of new Transamerica life insurance policyholders ranging from mid to late-30s.