8th Asia Trusted Life Agents & Advisers Awards 2023

Joining the industry when COVID hit Hong Kong, Ms Catherine Wong Ho Yan could only complete her initial training virtually. When physical meetings were not allowed, that forced her to produce social media content, sharing finance knowledge for beginners and starting conversations with followers, who became her first batch of clients. She realised these simple tips attracted young women to follow since they want to take ownership of their future and resources.

As she continues to produce content online, while conducting financial planning sessions with millennials offline, she was able to create influence. In her first year, she consulted over 100 families, closed more than 150 cases, achieved her first TOT and became the LUAHK The Best Rising Star 2021. After her first TOT, she became the Rookie of the Year in Manulife. Expectations pushed her to improve her skills and presentations. Together with her agency, she co-wrote a book as a learning guide for graduates with basic information on insurance, investment and planning for the future home.

This project brought more attention and also her first batch of advisers joining her team. Five young women joined her in 2022 through Instagram, allowing her to have taste of being a leader. They created seminars targeting to help and empower young women to learn finance and investment before they graduate from university.

Mr Ambagaha Hewage Sajeewa Pushpitha’s main reason for success is consistency in everything he does. He is the only Sri Lankan to have won MDRT Top of the Table for seven years in a row, which required consistent hard work and dedication as well as proper business planning. He has an MDRT life membership that also includes three COT and three MDRT. MDRT TOT generates six times the amount of MDRT first-year premiums required. He has contributed more than half of the total SBU budget, which includes seven branches. All of this with a 100% retention rate.

For years, he has won the best customer service award and does everything he can to provide customers with valuable service in exchange for their trust. In 2022, he produced the highest ANBP in the Sri Lankan insurance industry by producing LKR651m ($2.1m) with a 100% retention rate on both first and second-year policies, with a total GWP of over LKR200m, which he claims is the highest amount collected by a single insurance adviser in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka has experienced a severe economic downturn, which had a significant impact. Mr Pushpitha changed the way he did business as a result and focused on finding new markets. He travelled to Dhaka, Bangladesh, with some referrals from existing clients and was able to complete more than half of his business budget from the clients he met there. For the past five years, he has achieved MDRT TOT by the second quarter of the year, demonstrating the strength of business planning.

Ms Tran Thi Huyen Trang stands out from other financial advisers by taking a proactive approach and actively seeking new clients, rather than just waiting for referrals from bank staff. She is always eager to expand her knowledge and has pioneered the idea of organising mini-workshops at branches to increase opportunities to meet with and provide financial solutions to customers. At the outset, Ms Tran was willing to invest her own funds to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach and her efforts have yielded results. Thanks to Ms Tran’s contributions, the Ho Chi Minh branch was ranked among the top two branches of VietinBank in 2022.

Recognising the impact of technology in the digital era, Ms Tran proactively arranges appointments and consultations for customers who are unable to visit the branch due to distance or scheduling conflicts. Additionally, she creates concise videos explaining the importance as well as the meaning of insurance and shares them on various social media platforms to reach a wider audience within her community and increase customer awareness.

Despite starting her career as an insurance consultant at the age of 31, without many years of experience in the field, she has always been passionate about her work. She regularly seeks opportunities to improve her skills and knowledge by participating in training, coaching, workshops and experience-sharing sessions. Through these activities, she gains new insights and perspectives, which she then applies to understand and advise her customers better

Ms Tran recognises that Vietnamese people may not yet have a positive perception of life insurance or fully understand the intangible benefits it provides, making it challenging to offer advice to customers. Therefore, she always takes the time to understand customer needs as well as their struggles and expectations. She analyses the advantages and disadvantages of each solution, ensuring that customers are fully aware of the benefits and rights of the insurance plan.

In 2022, Ms Hung Pei-Chi was invited by the IMM International to write a book titled ‘Protection-oriented Insurance Marketing’. Through the book she shared her experience running a branch and managing sales agent teams with less experienced life insurance personnel, while simultaneously inspiring them to explore and create value for themselves. When the COVID-19 pandemic was at its most severe stage in Taiwan in 2022, she lead her team to work with the government’s COVID-19 prevention subsidies. Integrating COVID-19 insurance policies and small-sum life insurance, she held a total of 11 online presentations, and sold 4,442 COVID-19 insurance policies from 2021 to 2022, providing policyholders with the assistance they needed during the pandemic.

In addition, her team built an image of digital transformation for Cathay Life while maintaining interactions between partners and customers. Regularly organising charity activities to express benevolence she spearheads her team’s efforts to organise regular charity bazaars and blood drives. She also works with the Show-Jyu Chang’s Social Welfare Foundation and the Chinese E-touch Community Service Association to offer regular support to the disadvantaged. One example is an equestrian centre run by Chao-Yuan Chang, which offers therapy to cerebral palsy patients.

In 2022, her organisation recruited 15 new employees, 11 of whom were full-time and four were part-time CAs. Their backgrounds include after-class tutors, nurses, master of laws graduates, and retired teachers. She values recruiting workers from diverse fields and firmly believes that only by recruiting a quality workforce can she keep improving the professional competency of her team and develop Cathay Life’s customer base. She spares no effort to recruit new employees and develop talents as she is committed to building a first-class team.

In 2022, the NPG Agency successfully nurtured 72 MDRTs, two COTs, three TOTs, and six Centurion Producers’ achievements. NPG agency collected the highest First Year Premium of MYR56.8m ($12.2m) in a year in Malaysia. Based on team efforts, they broke multiple company records, achieved MYR2m AFYP in two days, and 9,703 cases in a year, the highest in the company record. This achievement also led them to win the champion agency title in Allianz Life Insurance Malaysia for 14 years. It has shown that despite the challenges, they can overcome difficult situations even stronger than before.

Dato Sri Norman Pang hopes to be a role model to the team and he has achieved the most prestigious MDRT qualification 17 times, including a one-time COT. With that, he groomed 77 agents in 2022. The average production of the whole team is at MYR194,000 per agent per year against the average industry production of MYR50,000 per agent per year, which is approximately four times higher than the industry standard. These numbers reflect the team’s endeavour and the importance of having the right mindset to ensure they remain resilient.

It was an honour to have the NPG agency acknowledged by the Malaysia Book of Records for achieving the highest MDRT qualifiers by a life insurance agency in a year. This accomplishment is a testament to the team’s hard work and dedication, which resulted in the highest First Year Premium (FYP) amounting to MYR49m and 72 MDRT qualifiers - the most achieved by a life insurance agency.

He also received recognition from the National Association of Malaysian Life Insurance and Family Takaful Advisers and was awarded as the Champion of AKARD Leaders Direct and the Champion of AKARD Mega Million Dollar Agency.

In response to technology changes, Nan Shan Life promoted empowerment projects. During this transformation, Ms Huang Ming-Fong, with digital thinking ability, built the best example for embracing changes and keeping pace with times. Combining online and offline advantages to maintain outstanding sales and recruitment performance, she qualified for two TOTs and three COTs. Six agents under her management adopted digital tools to seize opportunities from new customers and met 2023 MDRT qualifications. One of her agents was awarded the Top 1 new talent in the honour club competition. His remote insurance applications amounted to 140 cases in one month, the highest monthly record in Nan Shan.

In the past three years, she recruited 79 new agents, 45 of whom were inspired by her IG/FB posts and thus expressed interest in insurance. On average, 80 new customers of hers each year are actively contacted or referred through social media, accounting for 70% of the total number of new customers. Launching innovative digital marketing, driving health insurance sales in a customer-oriented model she conducted a health insurance online workshop. Ninety-seven highly inclined prospective customers voluntarily signed up through social media: 140 medical insurance cases were sold within five days after an online workshop. This transaction rate is 14 times previous ones. One week before the launch of Nan Shan’s new dental insurance policy, she widely distributed a cloud-based questionnaire, the content of which was a dental health and hygiene education manual. She received nearly 1,000 leads within four days. A transaction was successfully closed on the first day of policy listing.

She is savvy in cross-border integration, combining insurance with charity to produce synergy value of digital activities. As the MCC of MDRT Taiwan branch, together with volunteers, she raised a donation of TWD2.6m ($83,800) for nine charities, including World Vision Taiwan, Taiwan Alzheimer’s Disease Association and Taiwan Spinocerebellar Ataxia Association.

Mr Choi JungMin is dedicated to turning the negative bias of insurance among people with hearing disorders. He has been fighting against the deep-rooted prejudice caused by mis-communication which made them avoid insurance in the past. Now more people know that everyone can be protected. He believes that these efforts contributed to the reputation of AIA.

He has also tried to improve UW processes for people with disabilities. He is confident that he puts his best efforts into it, believing that he represents differently abled people. By doing so, he hopes to contribute to the reputation of AIA externally and improve the perception of insurance by differently abled people.

When he first qualified for MDRT in 2017, he got a chance to give a lecture. Taking this opportunity, he could share his thoughts and achievements as a MP with hearing disorders in AIA. He believes this event provided an opportunity for colleagues to shift their perspective on the persons with disabilities. He believes it inspired and motivated other MPs with hearing/language disorder like him.

He believes sharing is the most important virtue of an MP. For that reason, he has been engaging in social contributions in return for enormous support and trust he receives from customers.

As he continues to take part in social contributions and sponsor social welfare facilities, he tried to send the message that AIA and insurance industry not only pursue personal happiness but also contribute to the community and the world. Recognising this, many customers come to him saying they feel proud and grateful.

Taiwan Life Insurance is committed to assisting agents in improving their productivity through digital transformation. From 2019 to 2021, Taiwan Life Insurance focused on the digitalisation of paper-based and manual services to enhance the operating and management efficiency of agents, achieving a satisfaction rate of 80%. In response to COVID-19 in 2022, Taiwan Life Insurance focused on the development of online merge offline, which is a new insurance service business model. This model strengthens the digital marketing skills of agents and transforms traditional services that could only be completed in person with customers, such as insurance consultations, insurance enrolment, changes and claim settlement into new full-process digitalised zero-contact services, creating the best digital agents team in Taiwan.

New full-process digitalised zero-contact services that save time. Taiwan Life Insurance is the first insurance company to obtain approval from the Insurance Bureau, Financial Supervisory Committee for the introduction of zero-contact insurance services and the first in the industry to introduce parent-child same-frame face scanning, enabling parents to accompany their underage children to swiftly complete the insurance enrolment process. Taiwan Life Insurance introduced a biometric identification mechanism, where customers only need to scan their faces with their mobile ‘phones to interact with agents and complete insurance enrolment within 15 minutes. This eliminated time and location restrictions for agents, thus helping serve all customers in Taiwan more effectively. Taiwan Life Insurance has also extended this technology to cover remote insurance services.

Taiwan Life Insurance has integrated online claim settlement and insurance contract changes services with blockchain technology. Customers can use the mobile claim settlement service through agents and choose to transfer application information to other 20 insurance companies for simultaneous processing, significantly simplifying the process and reducing time.

Dr Haruthai Kraiwapan is a committee member who incorporates medical expertise and clients’ needs into health insurance products. By leveraging company risk, clients’ benefits and insurance premium, she works with the AIA team to innovate products in health insurance and critical illness category that meet clients’ needs as a health fund enabling people to access a decent medical care.

She is a speaker on several platforms including Infinite Care and AIA Health Happy media around product launch, seminars for clients and Online Wealth 24 by providing information about AIA new products to agents throughout Thailand. She took part in a commercial introducing health insurance and investment product with Boy Pakorn, an AIA influencer. She wrote an article called ‘Let’s save our happiness and health’ as part of TFPA’s retirement plan book aimed to provide the public with a financial retirement plan.

She is a cancer warrior who underwent many surgeries as cancer spread to her lung and brain. Since 2015, she has been treated with various medical innovations including minimally invasive surgery, immunotherapy and targeted therapy. After battling cancer for over eight years, she wrote a book called ‘Cancer Survivor’. As a patient, she intends to share knowledge, medical innovations and thoughts on how to continue with life in a meaningful way both in terms of inner peace and financial planning.

As an advocate of employee benefits (EB) benefits to SMEs, Ms Maybel Heng reaches out to business owners (BO) and HR via LinkedIn and also to leads to educate them that EB can be beneficial to the company and their employees. To increase her outreach further, she wrote a book on ‘What exactly is Employee Benefit Solutions – Top 6 myths debunked’ addressing the common misconceptions about employee benefits. Citing facts and real-life examples of how having EB can help companies manage costs and benefits, this book is an accumulation of her years as a corporate benefits manager as well as regulatory requirements needed for company insurance. The book also won her five new SME accounts, two of which have an employee size of 20.

After the book was shared with the HR and BO, they were convinced of the benefits of EB, switching from giving employees a fixed annual allowance to providing them more value in terms of medical coverage as such outpatient and outpatient specialist. She sees herself being a partner with a company’s HR and working with them to come up with customised solutions catered to different needs of the companies. She has helped HR relook at their coverage and identified that they were offering lower coverage which is against the law and they had also been reimbursing cash for outpatient visit.

In the end, she helped the company restructure the benefits with cost savings, the company switched the EB to her despite being with their insurer for more than 10 years. While case size may be an important factor, her passion is using her experience and knowledge to educate SMEs of the important of giving coverage to their employees while balancing costs and benefits with regulatory requirements.

In 2022, AIA focused on the theme, “Going Beyond Insurance, Offering Total Solutions”, to excel as an employee benefits provider, introducing a range of compelling initiatives from IT solutions to wellness programmes to help companies and their workforces.

The carrier partnered with Ltria to integrate Flex Solutions into its eBenefits platform, providing a one-stop solution for corporate clients. Clients can create a custom employee benefits plan that fits their lifestyle by choosing personalised insurance plans and benefit accounts, increasing employee recruitment and retention. Providing more learning and development (L&D) opportunities to HR professionals. AIA announced a partnership with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) to provide L&D opportunities to HR professionals to support them in their professional development. Offerings include a learning and knowledge hub subscription.

Encouraging physical, financial and mental wellbeing, AIA introduced the region’s first Think Well, an end-toend digital mental healthcare solution in February 2023 in collaboration with WhiteCoat, offering synchronous text-based mental health coaching services to its entire corporate outpatient base. Leveraging WhiteCoat’s platform and network of mental health professionals, corporate customers can complete a mental health selfassessment, speak to mental health professionals in real-time and access a library of resources.

In 2022, AIA also rolled out the Workplace Wellness initiatives as part of AIA Vitality to engage employees and help them take care of their physical health. AIA held its #LiveWithVitality Corporate Challenge 2022 to drive engagement and active participation for AIA employees and AIA Corporate Vitality clients.

Amret and AIA’s partnership is unique in Asia because it serves a segment of the population typically not covered by bancassurance partnerships. In a highly crowded market of 77 MFIs, Amret has become the second largest MFI serving 555,000 customers or 5% of Cambodia’s adult population with $2bn in assets. True to its NGO roots, Amret has received the M-CRIL (Gold) Client Protection Certification. This certification is under the newest Client Protection framework by CERISE + SPTF which shows that Amret meets the highest standards in governance and customer protection across eight dimensions including pricing, over-indebtedness and complaint resolution.

These standards are a contributor towards Amret’s the trust and the reputation it enjoys among Cambodians. Amret and AIA have successfully brought affordable insurance to two segments. Initially long-term protection plans around 15-year were sold to Amret’s primarily agrarian customers. Very soon they noticed that persistency was very low. A reason was the seasonal nature of their income. In collaboration with Amret, a new product short-pay short-term product was co-developed with Amret. 2Protect5 allows primarily agrarian customers with seasonal incomes to access term and CI protection for five years by paying in instalments.

Comcare is the only group life and medical plan offered by a life insurer in Cambodia. MSMEs in Cambodia are exclusively served by MFIs like Amret. The partnership has helped bring insurance protection to these customers. In both instances AIA and Amret are the only players catering to these underserved segments. For reference, life insurance penetration is less than 0.6% in 2021 and out of pocket healthcare expenses in Cambodia are $1.2bn.

Mr Huang Tai-Yu has always been committed to improving the working experience of insurance agents. He led his team dig into the opportunities of the insurance agent’s daily work and conducted global research looking for best practices. A seamless and efficient working experience is vital for insurance agents. After a thoughtful and comprehensive assessment, he put forward the solution of NAP to the C-suite and other stakeholders. In the spirit of ‘what if we could’, he overcame all obstacles, condensed a high degree of consensus within the company and successfully initiated the largest digital innovation project of Cathay Life’s agency channel in the past decade. The success of the NAP project stems from his persistence.

He is aware of the silo effect by division of labour in many companies. Therefore, he led the team rethinking the platform redesign from the perspective of insurance agents in the most intuitive and efficient way. Saving 80% of the processing by providing complete function support, from CRM to insurance proposal, insurance application to claim, allowing insurance agents to get all information required in one place immediately. The integrated financial licenses blueprint significantly improved the quality of insurance agents’ profession.

During COVID-19, his team rolled out many easy-to-use interactive marketing functions and the most innovative remote insurance service to help insurance agents get through the difficult times. Unprecedentedly, he invited insurance agents to join the product R&D team, to ensure NAP meet their needs and wants. His team carries out publicity and education through various methods weekly and continuously collecting insurance agent’s ideas and experiences. Many successful transformation stories were filmed and spread rapidly across the country. During COVID-19, he was the first to hold a live event on YouTube to launch NAP to insurance agents. The presentations were well received with more than 10,000 agents participating online.

In 2022, the Philippines continued to face challenging circumstances. Restrictions were once again implemented due to the surge in Omicron cases, the market was volatile and inflation was at a high.

Through all these, Mr Benedict Sison led Sun Life with a steady hand and a determined heart. He made sure that advisers were equipped to overcome the challenges, inspired to fulfil their purpose.

He led Sun Life to fast-track its digital transformation, leveraging technology to reach more people. This enabled advisers to reach more priority segments in areas where it has little or no presence. It also provided more efficient ways of engaging existing clients even without meeting physically. This was complemented by strengthened agency fundamentals, sales practices risk management and performance and productivity standards to ensure quality amid the shift and the growing adviser population.

His vision for every adviser is to become their clients’ partner for life – offering advice and presenting relevant solutions. This inspired Sun Life’s long-term goal dubbed Sun Life NXT, which revolved around deepening relationships with existing clients while also engaging new clients. This helped differentiate Sun Life advisers as it highlighted the company’s financial literacy advocacy and life stage financial planning framework, which are both embedded in the advisers’ training.

Strengthening investment management is one of his focus areas because it helps Sun Life fulfil promises to clients, deliver financial security, win priority segments and expand revenue streams. He envisions achieving scalable and repeatable strategies as AUM continues to grow in the coming years. He also mandated strengthening capabilities via talent, solutions manufacturing and operations to reinforce Sun Life’s reputation for investment management.

AIA Singapore takes an holistic approach in elevating its premier agency vision based on three focus areas:

Redefining high-touch digital experiences: As a digitally-enabled and people-first insurer, it continuously innovates to empower insurance representatives with robust digital tools to deliver personalised advice, service and care experiences.

Its digital lead-generation campaigns supported insurance representatives in the generation of close to 126,000 leads and close to S$70m ($51.7m) in annualised new premiums in 2022. iSMART took the guesswork out of customer engagement by leveraging analytics-backed propensity model to draw actionable customer insights.

Claims EZ harnesses AI and supervised machine learning technologies to assess and process claims automatically without human intervention, allowing insurance representations to help customers submit claims digitally. This reduced the end-to-end turnaround time for claims processing to one-four working days, a vast improvement compared to the industry average of two weeks. This also significantly improved user experience. In 2022, 90% of the claims were digitally submitted and 84% of the claims were paid digitally. The fastest claim from e-submission to e-payment only took 30 minutes. There was a 13% improvement in claims customer effort score in 2022, an increase to 78 from 69 in 2019.

Nurturing new agents of change: Empowering and reskilling insurance representatives. Collating a library of marketing tools, content and templates to help them become effective marketing managers. Organising workshops to help them stay relevant on social media by inviting guest speakers including TikTok and The Woke Salaryman to share their secrets to success. Created AIAfluencer programme, where they learn to become content creators on social media, helping them generate more leads and sales. They get to attend workshops to be equipped with necessary skills to create content to interact with their target audience across social media channels. Structured training programmes with comprehensive capability building in sales excellence and leadership development.

Reinforcing commitment in ESG: AIA Singapore is committed to ESG, focusing on creating a more sustainable future and providing long-term value for all stakeholders.

Mr Alan Lin Yim Fai founded his own district family, the AL Family, which consists of 22 districts, 164 managers and an agency force of 1,031 as of February 2023. His district family won District of the Year/ District of the Century in 1999 and came in second for Super Grand District of the Year in 2011, then became first for Super Grand District of the Year in 2013 and 2018.

Insurance is a profession that requires not just technical knowledge but also a passion for supporting customers through different stages of life. It is crucial to invest in the development of agents. His talent strategy has helped agents develop their skills and grow their own business. The year 2022 saw the promotion of two district directors, four branch managers and four senior unit managers. One hundred and eleven agency members qualified for MDRT membership: One TOT, nine COTs, 84 MDRTs and 17 life members, respectively. They recorded 20 qualifiers to CEO Club Sapporo Trip and 23 qualifiers to 22nd Dragons’ Meeting.

He was educated in social work but chose to join the insurance industry upon graduation to help people protect their physical and financial wellbeing. Helping people is an essential part of both social work and insurance, as is having a client-centred approach, maintaining strong, authentic relationships and good listening and communication skills.

He considers his main role to be empowering team members to provide a high level of expertise and professional services, while fostering a genuine love for helping people and a greater sense of accountability for our community.

He invests significantly to achieve this and gives up-to-date job coaching and help members remove obstacles in their way, so they can achieve their full potential. He believes when agents show their passion for helping people, they demonstrate the true value of insurance in giving peace of mind, achieving financial stability and showing care to loved ones.