“Going beyond numbers.“
First established in 1931, AIA Singapore is a leading life insurance company in Singapore, with one of the largest agency forces. More than five thousand AIA insurance representatives help individuals, families and businesses protect what matters most to them, preparing them for the unexpected, and helping them plan for a better, brighter future.
AIA Singapore’s brand promise is to enable Healthier, Longer, Better Lives (HLBL) for more people, including its own employees. This is rooted in the very way AIA does business, journeying with customers as their trusted partner through every stage of life.
In the past year, AIA Singapore has been continually empowering its insurance representatives to become agents of positive change – not only helping customers cope with COVID-19 challenges, but journeying and helping them with challenges that may arise across different stages of life.
Despite the challenging business environment, AIA Singapore delivered a strong performance in 2021, supported by its digital-first strategy and ecosystem that has digitally empowered its AIA insurance representatives to better engage with customers every step of the way. AIA Singapore reported an increase of 13 per cent in IFRS Operating Profit After Tax (OPAT), driven by growth in its in-force portfolio and increased investment returns. Its Total Weighted Premium Income (TWPI) achieved 8.4 per cent growth buoyed by recovery in new business and steady growth in renewal premiums. The company also achieved the Number One MDRT company in Singapore for the highest number of MDRT registered members for eight years. In 2022, AIA Singapore also topped the charts to achieve the highest retention rate of MDRT members worldwide.
In addition, AIA Singapore’s Corporate Solutions delivered double-digit growth in Value of New Business (VONB) in 2021 and remains the Number One Employee Benefits Insurer in Singapore with over S$590 million in-force premiums.
As a digitally-enabled and people-first insurer, AIA stays ahead of the digital curve by continuously innovating to empower their insurance representatives with robust digital tools that also deliver personalised advice, service and care experiences.
For example, Xplore with Ally, AIA Singapore’s multi-needs financial calculator, enables AIA’s insurance representatives to better engage with customers by allowing them to view a simplified personal snapshot of their current financial health and coverage adequacy in less than three minutes.
iSMART supports AIA’s insurance representatives with features that have been purposefully engineered around customers, going beyond statistics to paint a holistic story. iSMART helps to take the guesswork out of customer engagement by leveraging an analytics-backed propensity model to draw actionable customer insights.
To create a simple and speedy claims experience for customers, the award-winning Claims EZ portal harnesses artificial intelligence and supervised machine learning technologies to automatically assess and process claims without human intervention. Claims payouts are now disbursed instantaneously and directly into customers’ bank accounts by leveraging PayNow’s infrastructure.
AIA eBenefits is a one-stop digital platform with market-leading functionalities that empowers HR professionals to access invoices, policy contracts, letters of guarantee, submit claims and perform member enrolments, while working remotely. Employees can access their employee benefits and insurance claims submission 24/7 anytime, anywhere
As an industry leader, AIA is committed to doing good and is focused on going beyond providing peace of mind to their customers through its comprehensive products and services offerings. They recognise that in order enable HLBL for more people, they needed to walk the talk internally by caring for their people.
With this in mind, they introduced AIA Live in Singapore, a three-part virtual event series with mental health as the overarching theme, as well as mobilised AIA’s football partners to help drive engagement and positive change. Through this online initiative, AIA provided an avenue for their insurance representatives to better engage customers on mental health issues during the pandemic when more people were experiencing stress and fatigue.
They also mobilised their insurance representatives on social media and established a new ambassador programme, ‘AIAFluencer’, encouraging them to nurture, educate and promote HLBL in the local community through more diverse channels of engagement.
Through these various initiatives, AIA won the hearts of its customers and employees and wrapped up 2021 with a 91 per cent score for brand awareness and topped the charts for brand preference.
AIA Singapore is also a leader in the health and wellness space, taking a holistic approach to ensuring they provide support for different facets of health and well-being. For example, AIA Vitality is one of the most comprehensive wellness programmes in Singapore, with many tools and benefits that target different aspects of health. Currently, AIA Vitality supports over 100,000 customers towards Healthier, Longer, Better Lives – and motivates members with weekly rewards when they achieve fitness milestones through positive behavioural changes. Members can also boost their AIA Vitality status to enjoy insurance premium discounts, as well as exclusive partner benefits.
Aligned with its people-first mandate and brand promise of enabling HLBL for everyone, AIA Singapore is committed to doing its part to create a more sustainable future. In 2021, AIA Group became the largest pan-Asian life and health insurer to commit to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. In that same year, the company also announced that it had divested from its entire directly-managed listed equity and fixed income exposure to coal mining and coal-fired power businesses. And in February 2022, AIA Group launched the AIA One Billion campaign, which aims to engage one billion people to live Healthier, Longer, Better Lives by 2030.
AIA Singapore is also making a difference in the local community. In parallel, AIA Singapore has also ramped up its sustainability efforts within the local community. In 2021, AIA Singapore pledged S$5M to the National Parks Board’s (NParks’) registered charity, the Garden City Fund, to plant 16,666 trees in Singapore’s parks and nature reserves over the next five years. The trees will contribute to Singapore’s OneMillionTrees movement, which aims to plant more than a million trees across the nation over the next 10 years, as we transform into a City in Nature. AIA’s donation is the largest private sector contribution to the OneMillionTrees movement and the Garden City Fund’s Plant-A-Tree programme, to date.
In 2021, AIA Singapore also launched the AIA Better Lives Fund, administered by the Community Chest, to raise funds to support children and families in Singapore through its adopted charity partners that will go toward creating greater access and opportunities for children, youths, and their families in the areas of education, growth and development.
“AIA Singapore has gone beyond premiums to focus wholeheartedly into the people aspect of the insurance business to superlative results. With the concerted, all-level push to humanising the welfare and well-being of all its stakeholders, from staff, AIA insurance representatives, and the insured, AIA Singapore has shown itself to be an admirable organisation, worthy of the highest ACEs accolade.”
Shanggari Balakrishnan, Chief Executive Officer, MORS Group
