After leaving the position of a TV host in June 2018, at the age of 23, Nicholas took a leap of faith to enter the insurance industry. Despite having no prior knowledge of finance and sales, he pushed forward with fearless determination and a desire to learn, which helped him achieve his first COT within six months as a rookie, making him the youngest COT qualifier in Manulife Hong Kong. In 2019, despite the social unrests in Hong Kong, he attained his first TOT and in 2020 achieved TOT for a second time despite the challenges of COVID-19.

Nicholas also learned to capitalise on his lack of familiarity with finance prior to becoming a financial adviser – he recognised that he could resonate with millennials and young professionals like himself who struggled to start their journey of personal finance with the lack of relevant knowledge and a trustworthy agent. He realised that educating his clients clears up a lot of misconceptions towards the image of an agent as well as the whole industry. He also uses his Instagram account to record the bittersweet experiences of being an agent in the hopes that it will allow his clients to get to know who they are trusting their money with.

The unprecedented challenges that 2020 brought spurred him to develop new ideas as he shifted his focus to investment-linked policies, aiming to help youngsters to grow their wealth in a manageable and sustainable way, while empowering them to start investing at a young age. He also designed a curriculum for young people with the company’s fund platform, providing courses from investment basics like reading fund fact sheets, to designing a portfolio that fits their risk level. This interactive way of selling that engages his clients helped him achieve his TOT by October last year.

And even with less than three years in the industry, Nicholas has been able to inspire fellow agents to go beyond their imaginations and limitations. This motivated him to take part in building the Young Round Table Committee in the company, to promote the culture of young MDRT achievers, while attending sharing sections in over 50 agencies over the last year.

Van has demonstrated herself to be a high achiever and an excellent leader. She joined Manulife Vietnam in February 2018. She was inspired to explore a career change after witnessing a colleague facing financial challenges with their son’s hospital bills.

While Van understood the value of insurance, she wished others also could see how it could help them during difficult times. That experience cemented her mission to help lessen the financial burden and heartache brought about by a lack of insurance or awareness of its benefits.

Van’s personal mission is to help change the public’s perception of life insurance in Vietnam, driving an inherent shift in attitudes that will address the protection gap and benefit the wider community. Her focus on greater societal issues such as the protection gap is also how she stands out in the Manulife community.

As a self-driven person, Van has demonstrated herself to be a high achiever and strong leader. She grew her team from 19 in 2019 to 120 advisers in 2020. She and her team contributed over VND19bn ($828,420) in first year premiums in 2020, with a growth rate of 253% compared to 2019.

Van’s team currently includes 12 agents who qualified for MDRT, and 17 high performing Financial Consultants, representing almost a quarter of her team. Due to her outstanding performance, she has been promoted five times in just three years, from a financial adviser to unit manager (2018), to senior manager and district manager (2019) to senior district manager (2020) and now area manager.

Van is a customer-centric leader, instilling the values and benefits of service and experience. For Van, the human touch is equally important and giving customers a memorable experience is how she and the team leave a lasting impression. She also encourages the team to widen their social circles and find opportunities to protect people, improve their knowledge through continuous learning, be fast adopters of new technology and leverage social media to build their presence with younger demographics.

Over the past year, Michelle has established a substantial following of more than 20,000 followers on her Instagram where she consistently curates educational content to educate her clients and followers on financial literacy. She also achieved COT in 2020.

As a financially literate woman with the skills and expertise to grow wealth, she utilises those assets to collaborate with women-owned businesses to provide financial literacy webinars and Instagram live series for women to have access to a robust and meaningful financial education.

She firmly believes that investing in women’s financial literacy is the key to achieving economic and social equality. With greater economic self-sufficiency and empowerment, there are no limits to what women can accomplish and she hopes to continue doing her part to empower women to achieve financial wellness.

In October 2020, she collaborated with United Women Singapore for their Empowered Women Series on Wealth Building, where she pledged her time, effort and 100% of the proceeds from her webinars on financial literacy to United Women Singapore and successfully raised S$1,000 ($755) to support UWS’ flagship Girls2Pioneers STEM programme and their local anti-violence initiatives.

During the pandemic, Michelle sought to upgrade herself with the necessary skills to gain a competitive advantage and enhance the quality of service for her clients. She implemented a robust infrastructure that supports various swings in financial activities such as conducting online Zoom calls and hosting webinars, which proved to be beneficial for her clients.

Michelle has also been volunteering with Meals On Wheels, delivering packed lunch boxes to senior citizens living in rented or single room flats. As her following on Instagram continued to grow, she utilised her knowledge and expertise in the financial field and launched her first ever webinar on “How to Start Investing” for her followers. She managed to raise S$1,170 from the investment webinar and 100% of the amount was donated to Singapore Children Society.

Krungthai Bank (KTB) and Krungthai-AXA Life Insurance (KTAXA) have jointly operated over the past two decades, bringing synergy and value to Thai society by leveraging each other’s expertise. KTB’s commitment to customer-centricity, nationwide presence, strong sales force, and professionalism have helped the insurer become one of the top life insurers in Thailand – KTAXA’s total sum assured has grown 12% annually over the past five years and the in-force sum insured accounted for 10% of the market at THB2,428bn ($78bn).

In mid-2019, KTAXA and KTB coordinated a revamp of their sales staff from salespersons to financial planners (FPs) with the aim to offer better customer satisfaction by providing comprehensive financial solutions.

Since then, salespersons from more than 1,000 KTB branches have received intensive training from KTAXA to focus on providing protection advice, as well as tools to become insurance and financial products specialists. KTAXA also launched ‘AXA Prime FP’ brand and campaign that offers additional privileges and rewards to FPs who have performed well and passed KTB’s customised health & protection products training. In 2020, AXA Prime FPs accounted for 30% of all FPs but generated 50% of the bank’s fee income.

Last year also saw the launch of KTB’s new customer acquisition platform on tablet, e-Solutions, that allows FPs to comprehensively explain products to customers, reducing time per acquisition and strictly follow compliance regulation. And in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, KTB began offering KTAXA products on Krungthai NEXT, its mobile banking app. It also shifted its product portfolio mix from traditional savings policies to investmentlinked products and health & protection.

The FP model and new platform have helped KTB differentiate its product categories and extend health & protection products to untapped customers who are either uninsured or under-insured. Since mid-2020, the bank’s customers have been able to purchase insurance through its branches using tablet or its mobile banking platform.

The initiatives have also been successful in helping KTAXA offer more complex products in the Thai insurance market, with the annualised premium equivalent contribution from investment-linked and health & protection products increasing from 21% to 51% of its portfolio total.

Joyce joined the insurance profession in April 2018 and has since consecutively qualified for Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT), Court of the Table (COT) in 2021 and was awarded Rookie Insurance Agent of the Year 2020. Her business grew exponentially when she started to digitise her prospecting and client experience processes, mainly through establishing personal branding on social media and exploring digital tools.

As a strong advocate of digitalisation and social media, Joyce has implemented digitalisation in every aspect of her business. She has also given training to thousands of Financial Consultants (FCs) across Asia to help them adapt to digitalisation in the new business landscape.

On the client end, her business is 100% powered by passive referrals that mostly come through social media. The client’s experience with Joyce is also mostly digitised from end-to-end.

She utilises GoalsMapper Fact Find form prior to meeting the clients and obtains close to 100% information for most of her clients before the appointment. During the appointment, Joyce uses GoalsMapper, Canva and various software and data presentation tools to go through the analysis with her clients.

On social media, her #DabaoLife video series pushes out key messages that Joyce finds inspiring to her clients. This also allows potential prospects to get to know Joyce prior to even meeting her and can already assess her values and who she is as a person. As such, most of her passive business from social media has come from quality prospects who have made the decision to work with her through her social media content.

On the financial consultant's end, Joyce initiated and held training sessions for her company when she realised that FCs were struggling to adapt to the video conference environment during the Circuit Breaker period and since then has trained hundreds of FCs to adapt to the new way of doing business.

In 2020, she took up over 30 speaking and sharing engagements to share her experiences with and train FCs how to conduct business digitally. As a trained Human-Centred Design and User Experience practitioner, Joyce also injects an understanding of human psychology when training FCs on how to adapt to the digital era. As an MDRT Mentor in Prudential Singapore, she mentored three fellow FCs to utilise digital tools in their business. These three FCs are now all first-time qualifiers for MDRT 2021.

Anthony joined AIA in 1982 for his first job in Hong Kong after graduating in the UK and in 1984, he signed his first group insurance case. Today, as district director at AIA International, he serves clients of every size, from small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) to multinationals.

Driven by integrity, sincerity, and mutual respect, he has achieved Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT) status annually since 1997, Top of the Table (TOT) annually since 2010, and holds numerous employee benefits records in AIA Group’s history including highest in-force portfolio and highest premium from one case. His team currently serves over 44,000 members from 100 corporations, with over $65m in annualised premiums, of which $52m comes from his personal portfolio.

Anthony sees himself as a partner to his clients and feels good about the work he does for them. He believes that connection with them is key, and that building a strong relationship means delivering beyond contractual requirements and exceeding expectations in communication, energy, and results. He makes absolutely sure to keep pace with developments in the HR community to anticipate his clients’ needs and, create an open and transparent relationship where feedback is shared, respected and responded to.

He also constantly looks for ways to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Recognising the protection needs of many employees as well as the financial and social needs of employers, he worked with AIA to develop the StepUp medical product, which has enjoyed an overwhelmingly positive response, and become part of the company’s core strategy to explore employee voluntary solutions. More than 10,000 of those policies have been sold since, and over 12% of these StepUp policyholders have purchased other life products.

With a burning passion for employee benefits, Anthony always wants more people to join him in the business and he is more than happy to help them along the way. With the rapid growth of the China market, the AIA China Corporate Solutions team has invited him every year to speak at their annual Employee Benefits Summit and he has also shared his stories and lessons he has learned with colleagues in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, and Indonesia. He enjoys meeting young and hungry professionals, listening to their perspectives and sharing his experiences with them.

When financial technology comes to mind, there are two main types of technologies — technologies designed to replace financial agents, and technologies designed to support financial agents. Headquarter (HQ), an innovation by HeartzMail, belongs to the latter. In facing increasing competition in the financial industry, the HQ platform that was designed with the needs of financial advisers and experience of their clients in mind.

The success of HQ is evidenced by the numerous testimonials that showcased the benefits and return on investment that users and agents have reaped from using the various technologies powered by HQ. Users have found HQ to be user-friendly, humancentric and valuable in solving real pain points as the system helps to streamline day-to-day business and sales processes.

Unlike many other CRM companies that focus on purely keeping data, HQ places strong emphasis on delivering touchpoints and enhancing the quality of relationships between clients and agents. HQ’s proprietary innovation, FirstPage, has helped agents consolidate a daily focused to-do list that cultivates a habit of calling on their clients regularly on their birthdays and for reviews. This not only increases agents’ engagement with clients and odds of conversion, but more importantly, this closes the servicing gaps and increases repurchase rates in the marketplace.

While InsurTech companies tend to focus on sophisticated summaries that contain jargon that mostly only agents can understand, HQ stays invested in helping the layperson understand the key figures that matter in their financial portfolios. The layperson who receives summaries via WhatsApp or Telegram from their agents tend to help them remember their coverage, plans and shortfalls better.

The personal branding tools provided by the Headquarter platform have also helped many advisers enhance their positioning and referrals, and currently powers some of the highest numbers of personal web profiles in the InsurTech industry.

In addition, the capability to automate the sending of physical cards and allow agents and users to upload their own images through the digital HQ platform has enabled users to display their creativity and individuality through customisation, bringing about higher satisfaction among agents’ clients and their families.

The unique and innovative solutions by Headquarter are in tune with the needs of the financial services market, and the out-of-the-box and fresh solutions that HQ came up with has brought about positive changes and impacted the way advisers think about and carry out their business and handle relationships.

AIA Singapore has gone to great lengths to make sure its agency force is well-equipped to serve its customers in the digital age. To free up its agents’ time and allow them to focus more on deepening customer relationships, it has focused on strengthening the digital ecosystem that makes its entire organisation simpler, faster and more connected.

In January 2020, AIA Singapore launched iSMART, a super-app that supports its agency force with features that have been purposefully engineered around customers, going beyond statistics to paint a holistic story.

iSMART helps agents take the guesswork out of customer engagement – analytics-backed propensity models help agents to be more targeted at engaging customers for cross-/up-selling by addressing their specific needs through personalisation.

Last year, over 225,000 leads and S$45m ($33.9m) in annualised new premiums were generated via agents leveraging iSMART to share relevant campaigns with prospects and customers, and almost 70% of total sales of AIA’s MultiStage CancerCover product were purchased on AIA NOW, a self-fulfilment platform integrated with iSMART that allows customers to purchase products instantly.

To create a simple and speedy claims experience for its customers, the insurer launched its Claims EZ portal that was developed in partnership with AiDA Technologies. The portal allows Singaporeans to submit claims digitally via SingPass Mobile and AIA 2FA remote authentication, provides immediate claims decisions through auto-adjudication using AI and supervised machine learning and offers customers almost real-time cashless payouts through PayNow.

With Claims EZ, the company’s end-to-end turnaround time for claims processing, from the point of submission to final disbursement of claims payout, has been reduced to one to four working days, compared to the industry average of two weeks minimum.

And to give customers more visibility and control over their insurance portfolios, AIA Singapore rounded off its digital ecosystem with My AIA SG – a 24/7 secure digital platform developed specially for its customers to inform, enrich and empower them with ‘self-service’ technology, allowing them to make up to 28 different types of day-to-day service requests.

As of December 2020, more than 560,000 AIA policyholders were on My AIA SG, an average monthly increase of 15,000.

AIA Corporate Solutions (AIA CS) has been active in the employee benefits market in the region for over six decades with an extensive operational footprint across Asia Pacific. AIA China CS was established in 2006 and started with a focus on the small and medium enterprise (SME) segment. Today, it serves over 40,000 corporate clients with 1.3m members from local SMEs to multinational corporations.

Committed to transforming from a group insurance provider to trustworthy wellness partner, the company relentlessly designs and develops better sales tools, equipping its sales force to provide ease and timely sales assistance and service. It has also invested in developing unique value-added services for clients to meet their needs in employee benefits and workforce wellbeing.

AIA China CS always puts the customer first and during the COVID-19 pandemic, it acted immediately and accelerated digitalisation to address challenges faced by agents, HR and employees.

For the agents, the company created an integrated end-to-end digital platform and moved all its training sessions online. It also worked with a model that encourages more members to get online, create engagements and identify their potential needs, and link them up with corresponding agents. Eleven online activities were launched on the AIA CS WeChat platform involving 10,117 members and insurance take-up ratio from those engaged members are three times higher than non-engaged members.

AIA China CS also launched a series of online HR seminars to timely and accurately respond to HR questions about COVID-19, as well as promoting a healthy workplace. Five well-known industry experts shared 11 online courses with over 1m views. It upgraded its online E-service HR platform that allowed HR to cope with routine work more easily and provide better employee experience.

For its employees, the company launched and promoted multiple online healthcare services to help employees conveniently get online medical consultation as well as drug dispensing and delivery services for insureds with hypertension and diabetes. And with the pandemic severely hindering employees from obtaining offline employee benefits services, it upgraded its WeChat platform to allow them to make queries, submit claims applications and purchase group voluntary solutions.

When Karine joined AIA in 2006, she did so with no prior related experience and with her family in debt. Despite that, she managed to do well and over the last 14 years, she has maintained a high level of performance in terms of team development, as well as personal production – she has qualified for Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT) six times, Court of the Table (COT) four times and Top of the Table( TOT) four times in her 14 years as an MDRT life member. In 2012, she was also awarded the Hong Kong Professional Elite Ladies Awards.

She was appointed district director in December 2013, in what was considered one of the fastest promotion records in both the AIA group and the industry. Since then, she has been awarded Insurance Agency Leader of the Year 2017 and has been listed among the Most Outstanding Female Leaders in Asia 2018 and Jessica’s Women of Excellence 2019.

As a female leader in the insurance industry Karine is driven to help others reach their dreams, believing that nurturing talents to become professional advisers will multiply the power of giving and serving, and ultimately have a positive impact on society.

Throughout the challenges of 2020, her group never stopped serving those in need, particularly the elderly, underprivileged and street cleaners. When COVID-19 sparked panic buying and prices of pandemic protection items soared and became unaffordable to the underprivileged, her group bought and donated 41,700 masks and 382 hand sanitisers to the elderly living alone via Bliss District Elderly Community Centre (BDECC), and to street cleaners by hand.

When social distancing regulations disrupted agency operations, she stepped up to lead by example, leveraging digital initiatives to move business activities online. Her efforts paid off and not only did she manage to maintain her high standards of performance, she also inspired several of her teammates to make personal breakthroughs as first-time TOT qualifiers.

And with so much negativity surrounding COVID-19, Karine made sure to be a source of love and energy. She organised various workshops, seminars, internship and mentorship programmes during the pandemic and in addition to participating in the company’s community initiatives, she also worked with organisations like The Plan International, BDECC, Hong Kong Road Safety Patrol and HKU Space.

Manager Shih-Fang Huang from the Cathay Life Insurance’s Zhangtai branch has been in the industry for 25 years since he began working at Cathay Life in 1995. He has served as the branch manager of four branches, and senior researcher in South District Operation Management Department since 2002. He became the president of the Zhejiang Province branch company in China in 2010 and assembled a strong team of agents for expanding business overseas.

Being an insurance agent is his calling. He excels at combining modern economic issues with his insurance expertise and using the insurance industry as a platform for resolving people’s financial issues. He is also a writer on economics and management, and published the book Capitalist Evils Café, which discusses the wealth gap and business management issues. The book is collected in the National Central Library (Taiwan) and National Library of China (China).

Huang excels at combining modern economic concepts and social issues with insurance practices and has helped the unit achieve excellent long-term performance via recruiting and giving lectures on business topics. Huang’s book, Capitalist Evils Café, not only discusses the current wealth gap and social and economic issues, but also shares his 19 years of experience managing agencies and sales teams with less experienced sales managers. His willingness to share was not affected by the pandemic, and he was invited to serve as a lecturer in a training course for companies in China in 2020.

Sales at the Zhangtai branch grew 91% and the organisation grew 37% after he took over in 2012. He drove team growth by encouraging colleagues to realise their goals. In 2020, six subordinate agents were promoted to unit supervisor trainees, and one to branch development and training specialist. The unit cultivated two district specialists who were promoted to managers in the past four years.

Under his leadership, his subordinates qualified for the MDRT. In 2020, the unit had 33 people who qualified for the MDRT (accounting for 33% of the unit’s personnel), and the branch led by Huang had the highest number of MDRT members in the company for three consecutive years (2017-2019).

An executive district director at AIA International, Raymond leads the largest group comprising 25 senior and district directors with 3,500 financial planners. He is a trustee of the New Asia College of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, honorary life vice president of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Foundation and founder chairman of the World Outstanding Chinese Association. For more than 35 years, he has made significant contributions to human capital development and youth employment.

Having worked with AIA for 43 years, Raymond is familiar with how the industry and its sales agents are sometimes viewed in a negative light. To correct the misconceptions, he wrote a best-selling book ‘敢作敢為 – Dare to Achieve’ with the aim of sharing his experiences and motivating downline agents as well as to foster society’s respect for the profession.

To develop a highly qualified team and increase the industry’s market recognition, he kept learning and participating in many advanced areas of study, such as psychology, philosophy and human capital management.

After completing a course to improve his writing skills, he proceeded to write ‘價值轉乾坤 – The Value Changed’ which became a best-selling book in Hong Kong and China, having sold over 200,000 copies. The book offered real-life references for agents and inspired him to start a human capital development training programme for the industry, where he managed lectures and workshops which have been attended by more than 20,000 people in Hong Kong, Mainland China and Southeast Asia.

In 1997, he wrote another book called ‘368°贏盡生命 – 368° Win the completed life’ and organised a training programme for the Continuing Education Fund (CEF). This personal talent workshop supported by the Hong Kong Government provided leadership training for civil servants, businessmen and entrepreneurs. The book contributed to building social recognition and respect for insurance practitioners and built a positive image for the industry.

Over the decades, Raymond has also played an integral role in managing the abuse of compensation claims and controlling the rapid increase in the cost of medical premiums, while maintaining the highest levels of performance in the group insurance sector.

When she was 17 years old, Jacqueline’s father suffered a stroke and with no insurance, she had to take a tuition fee loan and give part-time tuition to fund her studies. This fuelled her belief in the importance of insurance and in 1996, while still an undergraduate, she started her career with AIA at the tender age of 21.

Consistent and hardworking, she has since qualified for the Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT) for 20 years, Court of the Table (COT) nine times, and reached Top of the Table in 2021. She has attained the highest accolade, the Centurion Club, in AIA Singapore for 21 consecutive years since 2001 and has also qualified for the President Club, which recognises the crème de la crème from each country within the AIA Group, for five terms.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jacqueline went the extra mile to make sure her clients were well taken care of. She spared no effort in sourcing for hand sanitisers and masks for her clients, at a time when there were almost no supplies in Singapore, and sent out numerous care-packages of masks, hand sanitisers and Vitamin C, to her clients, giving priority to families with senior citizens or children.

Throughout this period, she continued to reach out to more charities on top of her regular contributions, while encouraging her peers to do the same. She also shared various links to encourage her clients who were not affected financially to reach out to those in need.

Harbouring a passion for teaching, Jacqueline has mentored countless people over the years, many of whom managed to grow their business and qualify for the MDRT and COT with her guidance. She shares her secrets of success with new agents and often encourages them to offer service with a genuine heart.

Jacqueline has also demonstrated a tremendous ability to build long-term relationships by making sure to be there for them through good and bad times while ensuring their health and financial needs are taken care of. After 25 years in AIA, she is currently serving the 3rd generation of her clients.

Batsy is the manager of Cathay Life Insurance’s (Cathay) Marketing Planning section, leading a team of 21 members. She also plays a linking role in the company’s mid-term strategic development leading a team across four departments.

She has been described as an innovator dedicated to creating new business models and is constantly resolving difficulties encountered by agents. To solve agents’ difficulties in expanding their customer base, she established a systematic worksite model that successfully attracted 24,000 customers from different industries.

Batsy is dedicated to improving four key competencies of Cathay’s 27,000 agents: Cultivation competency, professionalism, marketing competency and agility. Based on her team members’ specialties, she built a systematic ‘4E’ model which comprises lecturer cultivation (education), experience duplication (experience), participation and exchange (engagement) and efficient tool application (efficiency).

For education, a product consultant selection and evaluation system was established, where outstanding agents with marketing experience are selected to be trained as lecturers, and will eventually have the responsibility of teaching local agents.

To spread experience, Batsy and her team conduct seminars where external experts are invited to improve product knowledge, and internal experts share their marketing practices. To increase agility, she engaged outstanding agents as product consultants to conduct in-depth discussions on product design and set up a communication group to share product information and gather feedback on a regular basis.

She also realised that agents need to be able to share case examples when they communicate insurance concepts to customers. In light of that, she led her team to select common claims settlement cases, together with interactive questions and diagram analysis, and generated 30 online marketing books targeting different types of insurances and customer groups, which quickly raised customers’ insurance awareness.

To allow agents to communicate insurance concepts more completely, Batsy worked with agents to develop the 321+1 protection requirements methodology. She implemented it in Cathay’s exclusive scientific management tool, the Cathay Box app, which allows agents to systematically establish the concept of overall protection breadth and depth for customers. Results have shown that the follow-up closing rate with customers contacted using this strategy is 1.7 times higher than using the normal marketing model.

Having already been on a three-year digital transformation roadmap since 2018, AIA Singapore was well-positioned to equip its agents with the digital tools and abilities they required to continue serving its customers through the disruption caused by COVID-19.

Despite this head-start, the insurer was not content to rest on its laurels and sought to not only help its customers cope with the challenges of the pandemic but overcome them. Taking a holistic approach, AIA Singapore focused on elevating its ‘Premier Agency’ vision in a few key areas.

Doubling down on customercentricity, the company launched iSMART, an all-in-one agency mobile app, as part of its efforts to strengthen its digital ecosystem and provide a seamless end-toend digital experience for its customers. With added financial anxiety stemming from the pandemic and greater expectation for agents to deliver on their promise, AIA Singapore also introduced a claims portal, Claims EZ to reassure its agents of their ability to pay out claims quickly for customers.

With COVID-19 continuing to cause significant anxiety about financial futures and job security, the insurer launched its #EmbracingNewNorms campaign that featured value-added services, complimentary benefits, promotions and consumer education throughout 2020 that stayed sensitive to consumer needs at different stages of the evolving COVID-19 situation.

As part of the campaign, AIA Singapore granted free COVID-19 coverage for 2.6m of its customers, employees and tied representatives; paid for 50,000 telehealth consultations, allowing customers to seek medical help from the comfort of their own home; and offered the AIA COVID-19 Support Programme that allows financially affected corporate customers and individuals to extend the grace period of premium payments.

The insurer has continued to support Singapore’s national agenda of upskilling for a more competitive financial sector workforce. It introduced AIA Financial Career Scheme 2020 – a strategic collaboration between AIA Singapore and AIA Investment management. The programme created 500 new job opportunities with its agency force and provided in-depth training and financial support aimed at fresh graduates and mid-career switchers.

To give back to the community the insurer launched the AIA #ShareTheLove movement to protect essential workers and underprivileged families. AIA agents pledged their support by donating a portion of their policy sales during this period, with all donations matched by AIA Singapore.

Wen Wei Fan joined Nan Shan Life Insurance (Nan Shan) in 1994 as an entry-level employee and over the years has advanced and progressed through the ranks. In 2017, he was promoted to head of agency channel and is currently one of Nan Shan’s senior vice presidents.

Under Wei Fan’s leadership, Nan Shan’s total asset surged 28% from $134bn in 2017 to $172bn in 2020. The company is currently one of the largest insurance companies in Taiwan with 11m active policies, 6.29m active insurance holders with quality protection, 25 branch offices and 317 agency offices throughout the country.

In 2020, despite the challenging year, he managed to conceptualise a number of strategies – for implementing sales transformation, insurance innovation, and practicing sustainable philanthropy and public services – and led the company’s business teams to achieving those goals.

Firstly, Wei Fan established a systematic agent training platform to promote the MDRT and co-develop an eMBA program with National Taiwan University for Nan Shan’s senior management. The platform has trained 1,423 people to serve as supervisors and increased the company’s sales force by nearly 6,000 – a 19.6% increase.

He also helped the company continue to innovate in its transition from simply paying claims to prevention. This was achieved via the introduction of a series of ‘spillover’ policies, as well as health management services which involved cooperation with Taipei Medical University.

And to achieve the targets of practicing sustainable philanthropy and public services, he worked with 204 hospitals in Taiwan to promote the Nan Shan Charity Fund—Medical Care Plan, which has since donated over $14m and benefitted 37,000 people.

During the year, he also helped the company implement inclusive financial services, working with local cities and counties to promote and provide micro-life insurance to low income Taiwanese.

On top of all that, he actively led agents to form the Nan Shan National Relief Volunteer Team to assist the government to explain the relief plan during the pandemic. More that 16,000 Nan Shan agents have participated in the volunteer team training, while 7,512 have completed it.