Greece remains one of Europe's least insurance-penetrated markets. Total insurance premiums amounted to around 2.5 per cent of GDP in 2024, up from 2.4 per cent in 2023, according to the Hellenic Association of Insurance Companies — well below the levels seen in more developed European insurance markets, and well below the roughly 7.5 per cent EU average reported by EIOPA.

On the usual telling, that gap reflects a country still recovering from a decade of austerity, where households have little left over to save and even less appetite for financial products sold by institutions that failed them before.

My own research into the attitudes of Greek pension-system stakeholders — policymakers, insurance professionals, and public administrators — tells a more specific story, and a more useful one for anyone trying to fix the problem. The gap is not primarily about appetite for private provision. It is about who citizens trust to deliver it.

In a 2026 survey of 68 stakeholders across these groups, the single highest-rated item in the entire dataset was not a demand for lower fees, or scepticism about private insurers, or a preference for the state to simply do more. It was support for simple, transparent product design — rated 4.43 out of 5, the strongest agreement of anything asked. Consumer-protection legislation came a close second, at 4.25. Reforming tax incentives for private pension savings followed at 4.24.

Set those numbers against a very different one: confidence that the Greek government is currently doing enough to support the development of supplementary pensions scored just 2.63. That is the real story in the data.

Stakeholders are not resistant to private insurers playing a bigger role in retirement provision. They are withholding trust from the institutions responsible for making sure that role is delivered honestly.

This distinction matters because it points to a different policy response than the one Greece has mostly tried. For years, the default lever has been incentive design — tax relief, subsidies, structural reform of the public pillar. Those measures matter, and my survey respondents rated tax reform reasonably highly. But incentive size was never the constraint the data pointed to most clearly. Trust was.

Demographic pressure makes this more than an academic distinction. Greece already has one of Europe's oldest population structures, and Eurostat projections point to an old-age dependency ratio well above 60 per cent by 2050 — meaning fewer than two working-age adults for every retiree within a generation.

The public, pay-as-you-go pillar cannot absorb that pressure alone; every serious analysis of Greek pension sustainability, including the OECD's, has said as much for years. A supplementary private pillar is not optional. The question is only whether it becomes large enough, fast enough, to matter.

This is where TEKA — Greece's newly established supplementary pension fund — becomes the live test case. TEKA gives Greece a new funded institutional model for supplementary retirement provision, with contributions accumulated and invested through individual accounts.

But my research suggests the fund's success will not be determined mainly by contribution rates or product menus. It will be determined by whether Greek savers come to believe that this particular institution, unlike the ones that came before it, will do what it says.

Three things follow from this, and none of them are exotic.

First, product design should be treated as a trust mechanism, not a marketing choice. The strength of support for 'simple and transparent' products in my survey was not incidental — it reflects a population that has been burned by complexity before and reads opacity as a warning sign, not neutral information.

Second, consumer protection needs to be visible, not just present. A regulatory framework that exists on paper does little to close a trust gap if ordinary savers cannot see it working. A public-facing marker of independent oversight — something as simple as a clearly communicated 'supervised and protected' standard for qualifying products — would do more for participation than most people expect.

Third, and most uncomfortably for policymakers: the visibility gap between reform intentions and delivery needs to close before the incentive gap does. Greek stakeholders in my survey were not asking for more promises. They were asking for evidence that promises get kept.

None of this is a case against private insurers, or against the multi-pillar model the World Bank has long recommended for ageing societies. If anything, it is a case for insurers and regulators to stop treating trust as a soft, secondary concern that follows automatically once the right products and incentives are in place. In Greece, at least, the evidence points the other way: trust is the precondition, not the by-product.

TEKA is operational. Awareness of supplementary products is rising. The conditions for narrowing Greece's substantial pension-insurance gap are more favourable than they have been in a decade. Whether Greece uses that window will depend less on how good the products are than on whether anyone believes the people selling them this time.

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