Blog; Quora Answer: What is the Commission, in Singapore, for Introducing a Foreign Investor Willing to Invest Up to US$100 Million?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What is the commission, in Singapore, for introducing a foreign investor who is willing to invest up to $100 million?” 

I normally charge around 2.5% of the project value, and that is an unofficial benchmark you should look at.  If you want to do this, however, it is best not be merely an introducer.  As an introducer, you have no value add once the parties meet.  You have to know the business environment, tax implications, insurance required, banking requirements, and have contacts with your own network of tax consultants, financial advisors, lawyers and investment bankers.  As a consultant, your client sees you as a value add, and a business asset.  You are charging him for opening doors, and not merely introducing him to someone.  Business networks take time and effort to build. I do not give out names and numbers easily, or cheaply.

Changing Toastmasters Culture is Not a Mandate; It is a Movement.

As I reflect on my time as Division Director for Toastmasters District 80’s Division G, one lesson learned in the face of a pandemic is that we need a new direction.  It is past the time when we do things as they were and pretend we can go back to how it was once this pandemic passed.  The world has changed, and people have changed with it.  It is time to be ahead of that curve, not playing catch-up.

One thing that needs changing, and this remains a constant work in progress, is culture, at club level, at Division level, and at District level.  My first thought was that such a change would require a top-down approach.  That was the basis for putting a team in place to run for the top three positions over five years, involving two years of picking talent and one term of training them within that window.  A three-year succession plan was drawn up, and bargains struck with other Divisions.  The same rules used to wage war are the ones used in large organisations.

One term as Division Director was enough to reveal a harder truth: the District Director is powerless without acclaim or genuine support.  As is the nature of such organisations, the most inoffensive tend to rise to the top, typically older men of modest professional accomplishment, most importantly posing little threat to established power bases.  A successive line of Directors, each holding real influence in only one or two Divisions but no broader mandate, produces a state of near-permanent ossification in leadership.  Volunteer systems reward mediocrity, because failure carries little consequence, while offending carries more.  This would fail instantly in the corporate sphere, where it would show up directly in profit and market share.  It would fail in government, where it would show up in lost elections.

Culture as an Invisible Ocean

In hierarchical volunteer organisations with no command structure, change comes from acclaim, wide adoption, and an evangelical movement, not from an imaginary mandate secured in a disinterested election.  Delegates who take votes seriously vote out of self-interest, and that self-interest tends to favour the status quo.  It is human nature, both a hindrance and a flaw worth exploiting deliberately.  Changing culture requires a movement, not a mandate.  Mandates carry strings attached.

Experiencing culture is like being immersed in an invisible ocean.  We feel the current, the shifts in temperature and pressure.  We do not see the ocean itself, though we know it is there.  Fish do not see the sea unless removed from it.  We do not see the air around us until we leave the atmosphere.  Culture, as a living movement of values and thought, is better understood by those not fully immersed in it, those able to step outside the ocean and observe it.  When the current runs with us, the journey is easier, and approval follows.  When it runs against us, everything, from policy implementation to new programmes, meets resistance.

The Microsoft Case Study

Satya Narayana Nadella took over as Microsoft’s third CEO in 2014, inheriting a company Wall Street and Silicon Valley regarded as fading toward irrelevance, hamstrung by a competitive, hierarchical culture that stifled collaboration.  Nadella did not issue a memo declaring Microsoft’s culture changed.  He introduced a cultural lever, the “growth mindset,” drawn from psychologist Dr. Carol Susa Dweck’s research, and worked with Kathleen Hogan, his Chief People Officer, to embed it across more than 130,000 employees, reframing the company’s identity from a “know-it-all” culture to a “learn-it-all” one.  This took years, not a single directive, and it required Nadella himself to model the behaviour, listening, asking questions, and openly acknowledging what Microsoft needed to unlearn, rather than simply commanding subordinates to change.  The results speak for themselves: Microsoft’s market value rose from US$300 billion in 2014 to over US$2.5 trillion by 2023, and revenue more than tripled to US$281.7 billion by fiscal year 2025.  A culture shift, nurtured rather than mandated, produced measurable, compounding results over a decade.  Toastmasters District 80 is a smaller organisation, but the underlying mechanism does not change with scale.

Why 70% of Change Initiatives Fail Anyway

McKinsey’s own research, echoing a figure originally attributed to change theorist Dr. John Paul Kotter, has long suggested 70% of organisational change initiatives fail to achieve their goals.  The empirical origin of that number has been contested by researchers who note it has been repeated for decades without a single, clean study behind it, though McKinsey’s own 2021 report, “Losing from Day One,” independently found fewer than a third of transformations succeed at both improving performance and sustaining that improvement over time.  Gartner found that only 38% of employees were willing to support organisational change in 2022, down sharply from 74% in 2016, a collapse in appetite for top-down mandate this analysis warns against.  The pattern generalises directly to Toastmasters.  Culture change is often the most challenging part of any transformation, and Toastmasters is no different.  Innovation demands a new paradigm and new behaviour from leaders and ordinary members alike, behaviour frequently antithetical to the norms District 80 has developed over decades.  That change cannot be achieved through top-down mandate, even under effective leadership, and it becomes more implausible under mediocre leadership.  A new culture must be nurtured from within the collective habits and shared perceptions of members themselves.  People must be guided toward a new direction, not issued one.

At its core, Toastmasters applies the art of rhetoric at a practical, individual level, taking the ordinary person and pushing him toward the heights of public speaking, so he can give voice to others like him.  It is about making people heard and validated, and about keeping the conversation alive so that disparate groups, across culture, class, nationality, ethnicity, and language, feel connected to a shared ocean of humanity.

The challenge is that people remain invested in the belief that meaningful interaction only happens physically.  Much communication does run through body language, yet modern technology has brought intimacy to a new level entirely.  That is the paradox of video meetings.  While we reach a wider audience globally, we sit closer to them in intimacy, because the camera focuses directly on us.  This is the difference between stage acting and screen acting.  On stage, distance from the audience demands big, recognisable movement.  On screen, the camera sits in your face, and movement must be subtle, deliberate, and intimate.

Building the Movement, Step by Step

We must invest in members and prospective members alike, since video calls are here to stay.  They will not replace physical meetings, but they carry value professionally and personally.  Just as Toastmasters invests in effective communication in physical settings, it should invest equally in effective communication across video.  That is the holistic approach.  Until members see equal value in online meetings, attrition and declining attendance will continue.

We also need to convince members that online meetings extend reach beyond a single club, and reach creates opportunities worth exploiting.  Interaction and learning flow both ways, and online meetings offer a unique, recurring opportunity for cross-cultural dialogue, an impetus to move beyond comfort zones.  This requires concrete steps.

The first step is identifying stakeholders at the most basic level, the club, meaning committee members who already share these values or can be persuaded to.  A seasoned Toastmaster who cannot convince the people nearest to him of a shared vision has failed and should return to basics.  Everything begins with what is in it for each person.  People move on self-interest.

The club then galvanises its own membership, beginning with a strong club, since strong clubs carry the weight to pull an entire Area, and then a Division, in a new direction.  The Toastmasters system is a pyramid resting on strong clubs.  This can leave a strong club president wielding more real influence than a District Director, particularly when that club’s own members also sit in District positions, from Area Directors upward.

Once disseminated and adopted within a club, the vision becomes part of its culture, reinforced through internal mentorship.  In a corporate club, this requires top management’s support, which is precisely why corporate clubs should maintain a deliberate policy of recruiting management members all the way to the C-suite.  Toastmaster values then operate through the lens of the company’s own culture.  When members feel personally aligned and invested, that becomes the foundation of a genuinely new club culture, leadership vision made manifest.

The next step is not the Area but the Division.  Strong clubs dominate their Division and supply much of its leadership.  Given the District’s structure, a strong Division Director controls more votes at District Council than most District Directors, unless those Directors already have Divisional support.  Area Councils exist to empower Area Directors to spread the Division Council’s vision and shape the Division’s direction.  This typically requires more than a single term, meaning any genuine strategic plan needs multi-term planning, with strong emphasis on succession to ensure the vision survives a change in leadership.

The Mechanics of Building an Evangelical Movement

Turning a vision into an executive direction backed by a movement resembles running an evangelical programme.  People must be converted through engagement, empowerment, and a system of reward and consequence.  Obstacles and threats, frequently leftover leadership invested in the status quo, the actual drivers of organisational ossification, must be identified and addressed, sometimes ruthlessly.

The mechanics themselves run in five parts.  First, investment of time and articulation of vision by the team, until each person buys in and becomes an active stakeholder.  Second, leadership must never translate vision into the social power dynamic too simplistically or too hastily.  Conversion takes sustained communication, time, and effort, and followers need to understand their own benefit before they believe.  Third, issues must be reframed in terms people can relate to and adopt, applying pathos and ethos before logos, since larger crowds respond less to logic and more to emotion, rationalised only after the fact.  Fourth, people need urgency, created by identifying a defining event and framing adoption in terms of stark success or failure, survival or extinction, us versus them, contrasting who we are against an opposing idea inimical to it.  People need a named enemy to organise against, even where that enemy is merely an idea.  Fifth, orchestrate quick wins and small victories, celebrated publicly, which is the purpose events such as Achievers’ Day and Members’ Night serve: elevating paragons of the vision, diminishing threats to it, and steering the movement’s direction.

Why Leadership Must Never Declare the Shift

To succeed, leadership should never declare the cultural shift it seeks, since that reads as an imposed initiative and breeds resistance, given that people are inherently sentimental and seek comfort in the familiar.  They will rationalise their own misery and failure rather than confront it directly.  It makes more sense to highlight paragons and let people emulate the local heroes the movement creates, nurturing and steering direction organically rather than by decree.

At every stage, the work continues: ensuring people become active stakeholders who recognise their own gain, through continuous engagement, coalitions of self-interest, and co-opting existing networks.  People move on self-interest before altruism, always.  This means identifying leaders at every level and granting them recognition, so they become invested in the movement.  Engaged people automatically generate their own reasons to advance it, rationalising their own support, which is how innovation gets adopted expeditiously rather than imposed and resisted.

As network leaders grow more involved, they become icons, symbols people rally around, reinforcing the “us versus them” dynamic that cements loyalty and makes the movement genuinely evangelical within the organisation.  Change leaders themselves become symbols of the movement.  Their formal mandate of office is, by comparison, secondary.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters

What LIA’s Reduction in the Illustrated Investment Rate of Return Means

With effect from 1^st July 2021, the Life Insurance Association of Singapore revised the caps on illustrated investment returns for participating policies.  The upper illustrated investment rate of return drops from 4.75% per annum to 4.25% per annum.  The lower IIRR drops from 3.25% per annum to 3.00% per annum.  It is the first revision since 2013, when the cap was reduced from 5.25% to 4.75%, and it reflects a sustained low-interest-rate environment that has compressed the realistic return expectations of participating funds globally.

What a Participating Policy Actually Is

A participating policy provides both guaranteed and non-guaranteed benefits.  Premiums are pooled with other participating policyholders into the insurer’s participation fund.  The fund is managed collectively — invested primarily in fixed income securities with a smaller allocation to equities and other growth assets.  The returns generated by the fund are shared with policyholders through bonuses — either reversionary bonuses declared annually and added permanently to the policy value, or terminal bonuses paid on maturity, death, or surrender.

The policyholder participates in the fund’s experience — upside and downside — within the smoothing framework that the insurer manages.  The guaranteed component is fixed.  The non-guaranteed component depends on how the fund actually performs across the policy’s lifetime.

What the Illustration Rate Is — And Is Not

The IIRR is a regulatory illustration tool.  It is not a promise.  It is not a forecast.  It is not a guarantee.  It is a standardised rate used to show the client a plausible range of what the policy might produce under two scenarios — optimistic and conservative — so that the comparison between different products is conducted on consistent assumptions rather than each insurer using whatever illustration rate makes their product look most attractive.

The fact that this requires clarification reflects a persistent industry problem: clients frequently conflate the illustrated return with the expected return.  They do not mean the same thing.  The illustration at 4.25% does not mean the fund will return 4.25%.  It means that 4.25% is the upper bound within which the insurer is permitted to illustrate.

The actual return depends on the participation fund’s investment experience across the full lifetime of the policy.  That experience is shaped by interest rates, equity markets, credit spreads, mortality experience, expense management, and lapse rates — variables that no illustration rate can capture.

Why the Rate Was Reduced

The sustained low-interest-rate environment is the primary driver.  Participation funds invest a significant proportion of their assets in fixed income securities — bonds — whose yields are directly linked to prevailing interest rates.  When central banks globally suppressed rates to near zero following the 2008 financial crisis and maintained them at those levels for over a decade, the income generated by fixed income allocations compressed accordingly.

A participation fund invested in bonds at 1% to 2% yields cannot realistically project long-term returns at 4.75% without either stretching the equity allocation — which increases risk — or compromising the accuracy of the illustration.  LIA’s revision brings the illustration cap closer to what the fund can realistically be expected to deliver in the current environment.  The precedent is the 2013 revision from 5.25% to 4.75%.  That revision reflected the post-2008 rate compression.  The 2021 revision reflects the fact that the rate environment did not normalise as expected — it deepened.

The Critical Point: Existing Policies are Not Affected

Policies purchased before 1^st July 2021 are not affected by the illustration rate change.  The illustration rate in the original policy document is not a promise of return — it was always an illustration — and the bonus scale for existing in-force policies follows the insurer’s established annual review process, which is separate from the LIA illustration guidelines.

AIA Singapore has confirmed it is maintaining the bonus scale for all current in-force policies.  The illustration rate revision affects new policy applications submitted from 1st July 2021 onward.  It does not retroactively alter the economics of existing policies, and it does not indicate that bonuses on existing policies will be cut.

Does the Rate Cut Mean Returns Will Be Lower?

Not necessarily.  This is the question that will be asked most frequently and answered most poorly.  The illustration rate is a ceiling on what can be shown in a policy document for regulatory comparison purposes.  It is not a performance target.  A participation fund that has been delivering 5% returns does not suddenly deliver 4.25% returns because the illustration cap changed.  The fund’s actual performance depends on its investment portfolio and the market conditions in which it operates — not on the LIA’s illustration guidelines.

What the revision does signal is that LIA considers 4.75% an unrealistic upper illustration rate in the current environment — and it is correct.  Showing clients an illustration at 4.75% when the realistic long-term return expectation of the fund is materially lower creates a false impression of the policy’s likely performance.  The revision is a correction toward honesty, not a prediction of lower actual returns.

AIA’s participation fund delivered 10.9% in 2025 and has a 10-year average return of 4.97% above the new illustration cap.  The illustration cap constrains what can be shown in a document.  It does not constrain what the fund can actually earn.

Are Participating Plans Still Worth It?

Yes — for the right client and the right objective.

The participation fund’s advantage is stability and smoothing.  The policyholder does not experience the full volatility of the underlying investment portfolio.  In strong years, the fund retains surplus.  In weak years, it draws on that surplus.  The result is a more stable accumulation trajectory than direct investment in the same asset mix would produce — at the cost of some upside in exceptional years.

For the client who wants guaranteed cash value, stable non-guaranteed bonuses, life protection, and a long-term savings vehicle that does not require active management or high-risk tolerance, participating policies remain competitive.  The comparison with bank deposits at sub-1% per annum is unambiguous — even at reduced illustration rates, the participation fund comparison is favourable.

For the client with a higher risk appetite and a longer time horizon, an investment-linked policy with equity-heavy fund selection offers higher potential returns at the cost of higher volatility.  The two instruments serve different needs and are not direct substitutes.

The Practical Implication for New Buyers

If you are considering a participating policy and the illustration in the policy document has changed from what you saw before 1^st July 2021, the change reflects the LIA’s revised cap — not a change in the insurer’s investment strategy or commitment to the policyholder.  The non-guaranteed illustrated returns in the new document will be lower than those in an illustration prepared before 1^st July 2021.  This does not mean the policy is worse.  It means the illustration is more honest.  The appropriate question to ask your adviser is not “why are the numbers lower” but “what has the participation fund actually delivered over the past 10 years, and how does that compare to the illustration?”  AIA’s 10-year average of 4.97% provides a real-world data point against which the 4.25% illustration cap can be contextualised.  The illustration is the floor for the conversation.  The fund’s actual track record is where the conversation should begin.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

The Power of Miscommunication

At the height of the Cold War, Berlin, for capital of the German Republic and the Reich, was the gauge of how hot or cold it was.  However, by 1989, the Communist bloc was failing.  At first, this was economic malaise, but it was beginning to spread elsewhere.  There was no work, and not enough bread.  Due to a legal loophole, thousands of East Germans fled into Hungary, nominally part of the Communist bloc, and from there, cross into West Germany.  To stem this, the East German government decided to issue temporary permits through the “Anti-Fascist Wall” what they officially called the Berlin Wall,  This was meant to appease any would-be defectors.  The idea was that these were intended to be temporary visas for a later, unspecified date, with no real intent to implement it.  They hoped the people would be placated while they figured out what to do to stem the exodus. 

Unfortunately, the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was called, forgot to brief the man who was supposed to deliver the news on live television.  Günter Schabowski was an East German politician who served as an official of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ruling party during most of the existence of the German Democratic Republic.  Starting out as a journalist, in 1981, he became a member of the SED Central Committee.  In 1985, after leaving Neues Deutschland, the newspaper he founded, he became the First Secretary of the East Berlin chapter of the SED and a member of the SED Politburo.  He also served as member of the Volkskammer from 1981 to 1990.  He was a hardline Communist, and a brutal man. 

In October 1989, Schabowski, along with several other members of the Politburo, ousted SED leader, Erich Ernst Paul Honecker.  Honecker was the prime  mover for the creation of the Berlin Wall, and the architect of the border guard’s shoot to kill policy.  Egon Rudi Ernst Krenz, Honecker’s long-time deputy, took over, Schabowski became his deputy.  As part of the effort to change the regime’s image, Schabowski, as a former journalist, was named the regime’s unofficial spokesman, and he held several daily press conferences to announce changes.  He had already been in charge of media affairs for the Politburo.  Because Schabowski had spent most of his career in communist-style journalism, where reporters were told what to write after events had already happened, he found it difficult to get used to Western-style media practice of answering questions in an open setting. 

On the 09^th November 1989, shortly before that day’s press conference, Krenz handed Schabowski a text containing the new, temporary travel regulations.  The text stipulated that East German citizens could apply for permission to travel abroad without having to meet the previous requirements for those trips, and it allowed for permanent emigration across all border crossings, including those between East and West Berlin.  The text was supposed to be embargoed until the next morning.  It was also about a future policy that may not be implemented. 

This was the first time Schabowski had read the text, because he was not at earlier meetings, when it was drafted and discussed before the full committee.  However, he felt comfortable discussing it at the press conference.  He said that all one needed to do to conduct a press conference was to be able to speak German, and read a text without mistakes.  How wrong he was.  When he read the note aloud at the end of the press conference, one of the reporters asked when the regulations would come into effect.  Schabowski assumed, wrongly, that it would be the same day based on the wording of the note, and he replied after a few seconds’ pause, with uncertainty, “Das tritt nach meiner Kenntnis ... ist das sofort ... unverzüglich”, “As far as I know ... effective immediately … without delay.” 

The next questions was whether the new regulations also applied to travel between East and West Berlin,  Schabowski looked at the text again and discovered that they did.  When cornered in subsequent interviews, he reiterated what he said earlier.  The news was broadcast on West German public national television channels.  They showed parts of Schabowski’s press conference in their main evening news reports.  This meant that the news was broadcast to nearly all of East Germany as well, where West German television was widely watched.  The news then spread like wildfire with news reports continuing to repeat the news throughout the night. 

As the night progressed, thousands of East Berliners began proceeding to the six border crossings along the Berlin Wall and demanded to be let through.  Live television reported on the gathering people which only increased the numbers of East Berliners coming to the gates.  The crowds vastly outnumbered the border guards, who tried initially to stall for time.  No one was willing to order deadly force, especially with the news and such a vast crowd.  Finally, at 1130h, Stasi Officer Harald Jäger disobeyed orders from his superiors, and opened the Bornholmer Straße border crossing of the Berlin Wall. 

The fall of the Berlin Wall was the key event leading to the end of the East German regime, a state that had been crumbling for many weeks as citizens had been fleeing through intermediate countries surrounding East Germany.  When the gates were opened, for all intents and purposes, East Germany ceased to exist.  The Berlin Wall stood from 1961 to 19989.  It was a monumental physical and ideological barrier between the Capitalist West and Communist East.  What treaties, the threat of nuclear war, and revolution could not tear down, one man who did not attend a meeting and read a brief managed to do so.  We should never underestimate the power of incompetence in communication.

The Civil Servant

In 2003, a story was published in “The Lancet”, about an unnamed French citizen.  He was a married man, with two kids, who worked as a civil servant in Marseille.  One day, his left leg felt rather weak, so he visited a local hospital.  As the doctors ran through his medical history, they learned that when this man was a baby, he had suffered from hydrocephalus, which is a buildup of liquid inside the brain.  The liquid had long been drained away, but the doctors decided to take a few scans and see if this problem was neurological in nature.  What they found astonished them.  The majority of this man’s head was filled with fluid. 

Normally, the human brain is protected by lateral ventricles, which are structures filled with cerebrospinal fluid that act as a cushion for our gray cells.  Liquid flows through these chambers all the time, but in the man’s case, the fluids were not draining.  Over time, the buildup caused his lateral ventricles to swell so much that his brain had been flattened to a thin sheet.  Doctors estimated that his brain mass had been reduced by 50 to 70%, affecting the areas in charge of motion, language, emotion, amongst other things. 

The interesting part about this all was that while his IQ was only 75, he was not mentally challenged.  He held a steady job, raised a family, and did not have trouble interacting with others.  Over time, his brain had adapted to all that pressure, and even though he had fewer neurons than most, the man was, for all intents, a fully functioning member of society.  And his leg was fine.  Once doctors inserted a shunt and drained the fluid, his limb returned to normal.  However, his brain is still pretty small, showing that it does not take much brains to work in the civil service.

Quora Answer: What are the Reasons People Do Not Take Out Insurance?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What are the reasons people do not take out insurance?” 

Insurance is part of risk management.  It has a role in estate planning, in risk mitigation for specific activities, and in covering unplanned expenses.  People who do not take up insurance do so for three main reasons. 

The first is that they do not understand the role of the different types of insurance coverage, and minimise its importance.  They do not prioritise it, since it is viewed as an expenditure.  If they do take it up, it is the first item to be dropped in the event of a cashflow challenge. 

The second is that they are sceptical about the role of insurance, or shun it for ideological or religious reasons.  Perhaps they believe that it is against religion, such as some Muslims with their quaint notions of what is shari’ah compliant.  Perhaps they had a bad claim experience, and imagine that this is all a scam. 

The third is because insurance is not a viable option for them.  This could be denial of hospitalisation coverage due to pre-existing condition, or denial of general insurance coverage due to a poor claim history, or they could be somewhere insurance is not well regulated, and the industry has a poor reputation.  This is most likely in developing nations, fraud by insurers or their representatives is not uncommon.

Quora Answer: Can a Foreigner Retire in Singapore?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Can a foreigner retire in Singapore?” 

Conceivably, yes.  To stay in Singapore, they need to acquire permanent residence, which is a challenge, or have some form of visit pass, which may be complicated for others.  The real question is why would they want to do so?  Singapore is not the sort of place to spend your sunset years unless you are invested in the nation, with family and friends.  We are not a retirement village. 

This only makes sense if that foreigner has sufficient assets to set up a family office, and manage those investments here.  That amount of investment would entitle him to a specific type of visa, as a global investor.  From there, acquiring permanent residency is an option, provided they manage to buy property, take up insurance coverage, and have above $2.5 million AUM (and that number is an estimate), and that is a start.  With that money, the cost of living is not a factor, and he could have a good life.