I
would hate to be a Manulife financial adviser.
Manulife plans sold through DBS financial advisers under a bancassurance
tie-up tell every tied agent how much the company values the channel they built
their careers on. Undermine your own
agency force, and your best people leave.
Market share follows them out the door.
Singapore’s
insurance industry runs on tied agencies, not brokers. The edge here was never lowest cost. It was customer intimacy. Intimacy opens the door to affluent
clients. Price does not. The more assets a client holds, the more he
stands to lose, and affluent clients pay for a relationship, not a premium
comparison. Structuring a portfolio
around real client needs takes a trained consultant, not a catalogue. Money spent on agency skill beats money spent
undercutting the channel that built the industry.
HSBC Proved What Happens without an Agency Force
HSBC
put its Singapore life insurance business under review. Chief Executive Officer Georges Bahjat Elhedery
reasoned, “We’re not in the top five in the life business in Singapore, and
therefore our ambition is always to be a leader in what we do, or let others do
it better than us and not be there.”
HSBC sold HSBC Life Singapore to Allianz for S$2.7 billion in July 2026,
with a 15-year exclusive bancassurance deal attached. HSBC never built a tied agency force here. It ran on bank-channel distribution
alone. Even with an entire retail bank
behind it, the business could not reach the top five.
AIA Built the Wealth Infrastructure First
AIA
Singapore launched its AIA Wealth Centre in April 2024, built for affluent and
high-net-worth clients. AIA leads Asia
ex-Japan by life insurance premium, with total assets of US$286 billion as at
the end of 2023. The infrastructure
exists. The gap sits with the average
financial services consultant, trained for years to sell protection to the mass
market, now pitching estate structuring to a client with eight figures in
assets. That is a training gap, not a
product gap. AIA Singapore must invest
in the agency force, or it risks watching the infrastructure outrun the people
meant to sell it.
Manulife Set the Bar Great Eastern Now Has to Clear
Manulife
Singapore sold a single US$300 million life insurance policy in 2026,
surpassing HSBC Life’s own US$250 million Hong Kong record from 2024. Great Eastern expanded its own wealth push
for accredited investors only in June 2026, two years after AIA’s Wealth Centre
and the same year Manulife set that record.
Great Eastern remains the long-standing market leader in Singapore and
Malaysia by premium volume, and that scale is real. Scale built on mass-market distribution is
not the same asset as a product shelf and back-end built for a client comparing
you against AIA and Manulife. Matching
the language is easy. Matching four
years of dedicated wealth infrastructure is not.
HSBC
had reach without agency depth, and it was not enough. AIA built wealth infrastructure early. Manulife proved what one adviser and the
right product can do at the top of the market.
Great Eastern is still catching up.
Insurance in Singapore sells through relationships, not price sheets,
and the insurer that starves its own agency force keeps losing ground to the
ones that do not.
Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author,
The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code
What about Prudential? Significant agency but losing ground too?
ReplyDeleteI do not know enough about Prudential to comment on them.
Delete