25^th Asia Insurance Industry Awards 2021

Cathay Life Insurance has been leading Taiwan’s insurance industry for 60 years. In 2020, the total assets of the company were $275.6bn (as of Q1 2021) and total premium touched $30bn. The life insurer had a total of 27,114 sales personnel. With over 8m policyholders, one in every three Taiwanese is a customer.

Cathay Life is the first life insurance company in Asia to adopt the UN Principles for Sustainable Insurance, thus raising the industry’s awareness about ESG. The total assets invested by the insurer amount to over NT$7tn, which accounts for a quarter in the entire life insurance industry in Taiwan.

It is the largest insurance investor in Taiwan in low-carbon and green energy industries and follows principles for responsible investment. It is also the first in the industry to join international initiatives, including the Asia Investor Group on Climate Change (AIGCC), Ceres Valuing Water Finance Task Force and Climate Action 100+.

Cathay Life was the first insurance industry player to launch the industry’s first Insurance Service Carbon Footprint Project.

In 2020, the company obtained both the government-certified carbon reduction label and the ISO 14067 (Carbon Footprint Standards) certification, thereby ensuring that every policy sold by it is a green product.

Cathay Life developed a new zero-distance communication sales model and designed Taiwan’s first anti-pandemic insurance policy, retaining the leading position to be followed by other insurers.

It also launched a more comprehensive ‘New Pandemic Control Programme’, which offers protection for a 20-year period. It covers not only hospitalisation for COVID-19 and other certifiable diseases, but also for specific types of cancer, major injuries and also provides life insurance.

In keeping with the digital and financial technology trends, Cathay Life initiated a digital transformation plan, which fully upgraded its digitised service processes for customers.

Mandiri AXA General Insurance’s (MAGI) strategy has been built around innovation and multi distribution channels. It comprises bancassurance, fast-track digitalisation and rapid adoption of robotisation with all partners including partner banks, brokers, agents, direct sales teams and business-to-consumer.

In 2020 as the pandemic brought up economic pressure and the market got highly competitive, MAGI adopted a 360 degree transformation with several innovative strategies.

The insurer made extensive use of virtual reality and augmented reality based games to create awareness about risk and insurance among the people at large during the pandemic.

It routes its digital sales through its insurance e-commerce platform that allows direct purchase by the end customer.

In 2020, MAGI introduced an integrated agency force selling general insurance, health and life insurance, as a joint force between MAGI and AXA Financial Indonesia. This is a new concept in Indonesia and allows more than 6,000 agents of the two companies to have broader portfolio of insurance products to be marketed.

To ensure smooth claim experience it launched an omni-channel claim service to ensure an exceptional claim experience across multiple protection solutions.

In 2020 MAGI introduced open API infrastructure, allowing real-time integration with multiple business partners for sales and services activities. The API connectivity is an important success factor to MAGI partnership with major partners, such as BCA finance, e-commerce and leading InsurTechs in Indonesia.

To stay competitive during pandemic, MAGI added several differentiating benefits to its health insurance products, both individual and group health. These innovative strategies brought about positive results and registered over 40% increase in gross weighted premium in 2020 compared to 2019.

For a company with more than 800 registered agents, the speed of commission becomes one important factor to agent productivity. Initiatives taken by MAGI to accelerate commission calculation by technology adoption and transformation and consolidation has played a crucial part in order to assume market leadership.

Amid one of the biggest health crises to date, AIA faced a mammoth task: How to reconcile protecting the integrity of its core business while continuing to uphold its brand promise of healthier, longer and better lives (HLBL).

The strategy and mandate to enable HLBL is rooted in the very way AIA does business, moving away from the traditional transaction-focused insurance model to become a trusted partner from payer to partner as it is often referred to.

COVID-19, however, posed some unique challenges.

Bupa Arabia also works closely with policymakers and industry regulators to deliver innovative and practical solutions to the country’s healthcare challenges. In a first-of-its-kind, Bupa Arabia released a whitepaper highlighting the importance of implementing a generic medicine framework (legislation) for the development of the healthcare sector in Saudi Arabia as part of the Saudi Vision 2030. The report sets out how a legislated generic medicine framework can result in an estimated decrease of SR10bn ($2.67bn) in medication spending annually and boost local manufacturing of drugs, providing employment opportunities for Saudis and reducing the medication cost burden on the country.

• Risk of disconnect – amid heightened socialdistancing rules and restrictions preventing in-person activities, it needed to reimagine how else the organisation could deliver on its promise.
• Mental health challenges – creating a silent pandemic, that gets less attention but is no less devastating.
• The economic downturn – continues to be overwhelming, leading to fears and anxiety about the future.

These challenges were in addition to the existing ones faced by all health insurers, which were also magnified during the pandemic.

Providing support to people who truly need it and tackle both pandemics, physical and mental and lead by example and to start it at our own front door has always been AIA’s policy.

AIA was the first life insurer in Singapore to establish direct partnerships with the medical community to manage healthcare costs together.

AIA has been at the forefront of implementing the recommendations put forth by the Health Insurance Task Force to keep medical fees reasonable and ensure treatments are in line with the established norms.

AIA Singapore has gone above and beyond the industry recommendations and also invested in providing customers more value and choice since 1 April 2020.

During 2020 the Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance (ANZIIF) remained committed to supporting the industry. ANZIIF focused on delivering collaborative industry projects designed to lift the professional standards of professionals across multiple sectors of insurance.

Over the course of the year it conducted a range of research studies which provided critical insights about the COVID-19 industry impacts on insurance professionals and their ways of working in the new world. This research also explored inclusion themes about how COVID-19 has impacted the employee experience at work.

The institute supported PwC to undertake a comprehensive review, research and analysis into the adequacy of the current training and education standards for training of financial product advisers.

It also announced the development of the Australian life industry’s first ever industry-wide professional standards framework, in collaboration with Australia’s leading life insurers.

ANZIIF partnered with the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) to launch the General Insurance Code of Practice for training.

The institute also launched a new initiative in 2021 called Year of the Insurance Professional, which is all about celebrating the success of insurance professionals and raising awareness about the good stories that happen every day in the insurance industry.

ANZIIF adapted to the new ways of working in 2020, growing its educational offering and online capability to support the learning and professional development needs of its members. It sought technologies and processes to move towards virtual exam supervision that balanced cost, security, assessment integrity and learner experience.

The pilot programme indicated that the anticheating measures, enrolment requirements and cost of execution created a robust, time efficient and cost efficient mechanism which ANZIIF has now adopted.

ANZIIF offered Myanmar insurance professionals with the general insurance essentials course. ANZIIF also became a life insurance channel with China’s banking and insurance media corporation.

Go Digit started its operations in 2017 with a mission to make insurance simple. In less than four years, the new kid became a digital first, technology enabled, paperless insurer with its complete focus on offering simple insurance solutions.

It won the customers’ hearts and became the first unicorn of 2021 and an almost five-star customer rated insurer.

During the pandemic it launched country’s first COVID-19 insurance cover - sachet fixed benefit cover – and in just three weeks sold over 4,000 policies reaching a premium of INR5,000,000 ($66,675).

2.5m lives were covered under ‘Group COVID Insurance Cover’ – for the most affected section of the economy - the small and medium enterprises, that were not able to fully function due to the fear of their employees and workers getting affected by the virus. The 24,000 groups brought in a premium of $23m.

The result:

1. India’s only almost five-star customer rated insurer with five stars on FB and 4.7 stars on Google from over 20,000 reviews.
2. Already profitable under IFRS accounting principles.

Go Digit grew by 44% during financial year 2020- 21.

Prudent Insurance Brokers is a major Indian commercial lines broker with 804 team members across eight offices in the country. It places INR21bn ($280m) premium with the Indian insurance market.

It commenced its operations in 2005 with a 12-member team and in the last 16 years has grown into a major insurance intermediary, which partners with over 3,500 large and mid-size corporate entities.

The company has achieved organic growth of over 28% CAGR over the past decade. In 2020-21 it generated new business revenue of INR400m registering a growth of 29% over the previous financial year’s revenue.

Prudent Insurance Brokers has achieved sustained growth in a highly competitive market which ref lects the trust and confidence that customers have in the company. It also acknowledges the value the company provides for the risk management and insurance requirements of the clients.

The company works to create long term sustainable and transparent relationships. It employs the Prudent360 portal to achieve operational efficiency. An advanced ERP system manages all aspects of client service digitally and enables collaboration across teams and geographies between the client and the broker.

The database built up over a decade enables the company to work with accurate modelling and provide precise advisory services to clients. It has worked on over 100,000 commercial lines claims and has processed over 80,000 policies and endorsements.

RGA Reinsurance has demonstrated its capacity to surmount major challenges and the power of resilience of its business model as it works together with the communities in a world struck by the pandemic.

It maintains a leadership position in the industry by delivering highly valued solutions and insights related to COVID-19 and other major issues. The company stood by its business partners during the hard and trying times and are humbled to have been recognised for those efforts.

The company was ranked as number one by the ceding partners on NMG Consulting’s 2020 All Respondent Business Capability Index (BCI) in Asia for the eighth time in nine years and received the first position for the 10th consecutive year on NMG’s Global All Respondent BCI.

RGA ensures that all its activities across all business lines – traditional reinsurance, global financial solutions and RGAX – result in solutions that ultimately create new opportunities for its clients and partners, helping them navigate the changes impacting our industry.

RGA has also introduced several healthcare covers in Asia that deal with very specific issues for the different Asian markets.

• Health insurance benefit covering cancer drug costs for Japan
• Spouse mutual protection product for China
• Next-generation juvenile product for Korea
• Cancer product for cancer survivors in Singapore

To address the pain points brought up by the pandemic, RGA took a number of actions to smooth the onboarding process for insurers and customers, minimising the pandemic disruption.

The reinsurer also developed and implemented a range of risk scoring solutions in the region through innovative and effective use of data sources to streamline the underwriting process, improve onboarding and speed.

Building on its legacy of continuous innovation, RGA partnered with some of the region’s most promising InsurTech leaders to continuously seek opportunities to strengthen the insurance ecosystem.

Focusing firmly on its long-term success, RGA has reaffirmed its commitment and ability to face major disruptions and sees opportunities even in a very trying times to help its clients and the industry.

Recognising the need for reassurance when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Swiss Re was the first to engage actively with clients in Asia throughout 2020.

It was an opportunity to explain the reinsurer’s risk mitigation approach and offer comfort around the reinsurance security as well as insights to its own approach to manage uncertainty.

Through its risk knowledge, professional people and global reach, Swiss Re actively supported its clients to understand new risks and emerging scenarios.

Application of fresh perspectives on vital topics, with a focus on enabling growth and innovation in the insurance industry, helped clients to not only understand the technical risks (and claims management considerations) but also helped them to understand the impact of changing weather patterns.

The global reinsurer added value to its Asia-based clients by providing them with access to the latest data-driven research and an extensive global network of experts on topics such as societal resilience, climate and sustainability, digitisation and emerging risk.

Swiss Re works to drive the insurance industry forward in Asia, promoting the setup of industry bodies such as Asia chapter of the IRMA to create awareness and raise professional standards in run-off management; or the Ruschlikon Initiative Group Asia – pioneering work towards automation and digitisation, and developing minimum data standards, which will ultimately create more operational efficiency throughout the insurance value chain in the continent.

Given the inability to interact face-to-face with clients during the pandemic, the reinsurer increased the number of digital/virtual touch points with clients by using webinars, online industry conferences, media and social media activity.

In 2020, Swiss Re hosted 50 webinars (centrally and regionally) reaching close to 10,000 clients. It also partnered with the Singapore Reinsurers’ Association to co-host the virtual SIRC event in November 2020.

Through the good times and bad, Swiss Re remains a reliable, trusted partner to its clients; providing continuity and certainty, helping to navigate regulatory changes and clearly communicating its position.

Insurance service carbon footprint plan, workplace transformation and responsible investment are the three main strategies that Cathay Life has embedded in its daily operations. The focus of these three strategies is to lower the carbon emission from its operations.

Cathay Life also exerts its inf luence on industries in Taiwan to attach due importance to ESG and climate change risks.

In order to improve the quality of insurance services and reduce energy consumption and wastage of resources, the life insurer was the first in the industry to promote mobile insurance and electronic services in 2012.

The life insurer’s sales primarily happen via a tablet and various policy services, such as application and claims for customers are completed online, thus reducing use of saving paper documents and carbon emissions generated in policy deliveries.

Mobile and electronic modes allowed insurance services to continue despite the pandemic. Customers complete various insurance services on their own via its app, website and virtual assistants to protect their rights and interests.

In 2020, the usage rate of the company’s mobile insurance application and electronic services was the industry’s best and the company saved more than 80m sheets of paper.

Cathay Life began its low-carbon transformation plan by tracking energy consumption via energy and environmental management systems, and by improving power use efficiency through equipment replacement, space merging, and utilisation of renewable energy.

Compared to 2016, Cathay’s carbon emissions in 2020 were reduced by 12%, better than the original reduction goal of 4%-8%. Cathay Life proactively promises to use 100% renewable energy by 2030, minimising the impact on environment.

Cathay Life has adopted the Principles for Responsible Investment incorporated ESG factors into investment processes, and supported industries that are conducive to sustainable development. In order to improve the industry’s resilience in the face of climate change, the company has taken the lead in the industry to launch engagements.

CoverGo’s fully configurable, modular, no code insurance platform, powered by 500+ insurance APIs allows clients to build and configure insurance products at record speed, improve policy administration and claims, develop omnichannel distribution and more without a single line of code.

With its proprietary technology and guided by its mission, the InsurTech continues to help insurance companies make insurance 100% digital and serve customers better.

The InsurTech addresses:

• Slow product building
• Heavy manual processes
• High customer acquisition cost
• Rigid legacy systems

The InsurTech’ s insurance technology platform helps to resolve these challenges by

1. Building and launching products faster than ever – configurable setup for any type of insurance including traditional products such as P&C, health and life as well as innovation products such as sharing economy, usagebased, parametric and microinsurance products in hours
2. Developing omnichannel distribution – B2C sites for insurers, broker portals, agent portals and e-applications for advisers, distribution via APIs, bancassurance/affinity B2B2C
3. Improving policy and claims management – digitisation and automation of end-to-end policy administration and claims processes via a policy administration system
4. Integrating with legacy or third party systems – 500+ insurance APIs, most comprehensive on the market, for seamless integration with legacy system and/or third party system

In 2020 CoverGo onboarded over 15 new insurance enterprise clients, expanded internationally to Asia, Australia and America, closed series A funding in August 2020 and almost tripled the size of team to reach 50 employees.

Business users can build and launch new products in days without having to do any custom coding or development. This cuts the product development time and cost by over 95%.

CoverGo’s platforms provide the maximum f lexibility and scalability for insurance companies to innovate and develop more distribution channels and enhance customer experience digitally.

Overall, CoverGo’s platform helps increase insurance penetration rate and opens up more channels for under-served market segments and allows the entire society to obtain suitable protection they need.

AXA Hong Kong & Macau uses AI to enhance efficiency on customer communication and service management.

Customers call a company or send an email to the company for a reason. They can, however, be served better if the information they need is provided to them in advance of their call or they can be provided an effective response to their emails.

Next best action (NBA) is a proactive customer servicing initiative used by AXA which uses predictive modelling to understand customer’s next information-seeking needs and then does the best information prescriptive feeding action before they make the enquiry call to the company.

The company analysed customers’ calling behaviour and the analysis helped the insurer to build the machine learning model to predict callers whose need can be met by providing them information in advance.

Mailbot is an AI solution that serves to enhance customer experience and improve call centre staff effectiveness by triaging and identifying the sentiment in customer emails.

In the past, incoming email handling was very time-consuming because it is basically a free-text format content that requires high human effort to process and ensure the right customer service to avoid customer dissatisfaction.

AXA Hong Kong & Macau adopted the most popular natural language processing (NLP) technology to accelerate this AI model training and implementation of bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) so the company was able to complete the development and deployment in less than six months. Besides BERT, AXA also used a string-search algorithm to detect sender identity.

The results of both the programmes were extremely satisfying

1. Next best action
   Registered a drop of 46% (compared to the year before the launch) in the customer calls as compared to 68% (compared to control group)
2. AI mailbot
   Triage customers’ email based on AI analysing customers’ identity, intent and sentiment when their emails arrive using NLP

Customer service team availability time increased by 10% and accuracy of identification of sender’s identity went up by 90% and the accuracy of classifying the email by intent/category also went up by 90%.

HSBC Life (International) Hong Kong (HSBC Life) is changing the way things work within the Hong Kong insurance industry and setting new benchmarks.

HSBC Life’s research shows that customers are eager to understand how much their policy value grows over time, as they monitor the performance of their non-guaranteed cash value in a f luctuating macro financial environment.

Customers also want to find out when their policy is expected to break even so that they can plan for any future financial and liquidity needs. Customers want all this critical information at their fingertips.

To enable this, HSBC Life developed a new platform so customers of all ages can easily obtain their policy details and projected benefits at any time.

A first-in-market digital policy value projections offering allows customers to view real-time projected values of their policies anytime and anywhere via online banking or the mobile banking app.

Customers no longer have to wait until their anniversary for paper benefit illustrations. Now with just a few clicks, the policyholders can instantly access their real-time payout benefits, cash/ surrender values and death benefits, including guaranteed and non-guaranteed portions.

All of these features come with interactive graphs to illustrate how the policy value changes over time. Live chat and mobile chat are also available as customers place great importance on convenience and speed for troubleshooting and servicing.

HSBC Life’s policy value projection platform is a data intensive solution, with technology at its core to provide an engaging user experience.

The company has also leveraged a real-time calculation engine that utilises the latest rates and charges in assessing values for real-time maximum transparency with its customers.

This platform has been made an inclusive solution, where screen readers can help serve customers who will enjoy accessibility features on their choice of device.

HSBC Life has recorded around 85,000 visits (as of March 2021) to its digital policy projections page that was launched in mid-October 2020.

With this level of engagement, HSBC Life hopes to continue using this servicing platform to better communicate with customers and provide them with new digital functions and products to help meet their needs.

Established as a non-profit, PERILS is now a leader in industry exposure and loss reporting across multiple major global CAT markets, helping industry practitioners address two critical challenges:

1. The availability of reliable exposure and loss data to enhance the quality of models and improve understanding of the catastrophe risks; and
2. The sustainability and affordability of capital to provide protection especially for peak CAT zones.

PERILS announced the inaugural release of a detailed industry exposure database for the Southeast Asia countries of Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand in March 2021. For this it joined the Singapore-based Natural Catastrophe Data and Analytics Exchange Alliance, to help increase data availability for natural catastrophe insurance in Asia.

The release in Southeast Asia followed PERILS regional expansion of its data coverage to include Australia in September 2016 and New Zealand in November 2019.

Following engagement by PERILS with the primary insurance industry, some consistent challenges were identified which included:

1. The need to improve the quality and availability of reliable catastrophe data to enable a better understanding of catastrophe risk in the region
2. The wide range of estimates of industry exposure and losses
3. The regulatory hurdles regarding availability of information (e.g., privacy regulations)
4. The general reticence by insurers to share the information required to improve understanding of catastrophe risks

PERILS actively worked with the respective market participants to deliver the Consensus Southeast Asia Industry Exposure Database initiative (CIED) released in March 2021. This was in line with PERILS’ mission to enhance the availability of CAT insurance data and to facilitate sustainable risk capacity over time within the Asia-Pacific region.

PERILS delivered on its market commitment during the last 12 months on multiple fronts – opening new markets in Southeast Asia, supporting the growth of risk capital, and improving natural catastrophe understanding through the publication of detail loss information on recent major losses.

Ms Victoria Tan has been a practitioner of integrated thinking and she promotes this across the Ayala Group. Notwithstanding the challenges brought up by the pandemic she took this up as an opportunity and ensured that risk management and sustainability are adhered to within the organisation.

She also continued to focus on climate-related risks and opportunities during the pandemic and advised senior management on this issue. She led learning sessions that helped educate executives and the board members on climate change risks, emphasising how it could impact the organisation.

Ms Tan organised climate risk knowledge and risk assessment workshops across the group. This gave the company a quantitative assessment of the level of employees’ knowledge on climate change, climate-related risk, their impact and the level of readiness in the group.

The data generated from these assessment exercises will serve as valuable input for the corporate strategy exercises in this area.

Ms Tan also achieved her targets for Ayala’s 2020 enterprise risk management roadmap – which she pioneered. In 2020 Ms Tan led the review of risk tolerance levels of the company and major business units.

She is now working to align the business landscape changes that have occurred due to the pandemic and also to anticipate physical and transition risks and climate opportunities. This will enable the group to act promptly and adequately.

She has also ensured that Ayala Corporation continues to follow the disclosure norms laid down by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) by the Financial Stability Board.

Mr Sythan Prou is called ‘a unique lawyer with a sound business acumen’. He does what is best for Cambodian insurance and a lot more.

Manulife Cambodia’s chief legal and compliance officer Mr Prou’s professional and personal successes have been a great example for many in Cambodia.

Being the first chief in-house counsel and compliance officer in Cambodia’s insurance sector.

Mr Prou is nationally acclaimed for his contribution towards Manulife’s success, development of the insurance sector, insurance legal profession and the local community as well.

He joined Manulife Cambodia in 2012 during the early days of the company and is a member of the company’s executive leadership team.

Mr Prou established legal, compliance and corporate governance functions for the company, which have now become good practices for the insurance industry. It has also won appreciation from the regulators on several occasions.

Being the longest serving executive of Manulife Cambodia, Mr Prou has steered the business forward and navigated it through several challenging times, both internally and externally. Manulife today controls about 40+% of the entire life insurance market of Cambodia.

Mr Prou has proactively engaged with the banking and insurance regulator and contributed proposals on future of bancassurance referral and direct sales models, which were accepted by the regulator and in March 2021 were issued as country’s first ever bancassurance regulation.

He has played a major role in promoting public awareness and upskilling insurance knowledge and is the elected chairman of the Education Committee of Insurance Association of Cambodia till 2024.

In March 2021 Mr Prou began working on a proposal for the establishment of Cambodia’s first insurance school, which once approved, will offer insurance education up to degree level. Insurance education programme in Cambodia is playing catch up with the drastic growth of the business.

In October 2020, the King of Cambodia awarded Mr Prou the prestigious Royal Order of the Kingdom of Cambodia – Mohasena (Grand Officer) for his contribution in insurance, education and legal profession.

With 17 years of combined experience in corporate, legal, regulatory and academic affairs, Mr Prou will continue to create significant impact on insurance, legal, educational and local communities in Cambodia.

Ms Yvonne Yuchengco is the vice chairperson of Malayan Insurance Company, one of the largest non-life insurance companies in the Philippines. She led the company for 25 years as its president and CEO before taking up her current role in July 2019. Under her leadership, Malayan Insurance has consistently maintained pole position in the market in terms of GWP.

Women’s empowerment has been a subject close to her heart and she was instrumental in drawing up a partnership between Malayan Insurance and the IFC in 2018, for a gender-based programme with the objective of increasing women’s access to risk mitigation and financial protection solutions in the Philippines.

Ms Yuchengco’s passion for innovation and to address women’s needs saw Malayan Insurance launch the ‘We Women’ programme, which offers innovative non-life insurance and lifestyle solutions to women in the Philippines. The programme ensures that women have access to the assistance they need for the challenges they face as entrepreneurs, professionals and as heads of families. The programme today encompasses a wide range of activities that help women cope with various life challenges.

The programme’s website shares motivational and inspiring content to further empower women.

With her vision to create a safe and gender sensitive society, Ms Yuchengco organised a number of gender sensitivity training workshops for employees and agents of Malayan Insurance. These workshops, apart from helping attendees understand and respect the role of women in society, also focused on the contribution and value of the ‘We Women’ programme.

For its gender sensitivity training initiative, Malayan Insurance won the ‘Best Good Company Initiative’ award at the Tokio Marine Insurance Group 2019 Asian Awards in 2019.

Under her leadership, Malayan Insurance has been supporting women groups that work in creating a better world for women in the Philippines. Ms Yuchengco strongly backs the government’s initiatives towards financial inclusion and gender-based programmes and remains passionate and committed to making an insurance-led difference in the lives of others.

Mr Tapan Singhel is an industry veteran with over 30-years in the insurance industry. One of the founding members of Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, Mr Singhel has been with Bajaj Allianz General Insurance (BAGIC) for over two decades.

Being the managing director and CEO of BAGIC for close to a decade now, Mr Singhel has built and brought up the organisation to where it is today with close to 110m customers and a wide distribution network spanning across more than 1,000 locations across India.

Customer obsession and passion to do good for the people is what drives Mr Singhel and his success in the industry. Under his aegis, BAGIC has been recognised as one of the best in Asia.

A scientist by education, but insurer at heart and by profession, Mr Singhel works to make a difference in the lives of people in whatever little way he can. He has not only transformed the company but has also been a trendsetter in the insurance industry by always taking the first leap towards innovating to enhance the customer service standards.

Known for his ‘communicative leadership’ style, Mr Singhel believes in engaging regularly with employees and customers through social media. An avid social media inf luencer, he has over 680,000 followers on LinkedIn and has been recognised as the LinkedIn’s Top Voice in India in both 2018 and 2019.

Mr Singhel also chairs the CII National Committee on Insurance and Pensions. He has been honoured as the ‘Personality of the Year’ at Quantic’s BFSI Excellence Awards 2021, India Insurance Summit & Awards 2019, 22nd Asia Insurance Industry Awards 2018 and Indian Insurance Summit 2017 and the ‘Most Promising Business Leader’ of Asia at The Economic Times Global Business Summit 2018.

He has also won ‘CEO of the Year’ honour at IDC Future Enterprise Awards India 2021, Annual Insurance India Summit & Awards 2018 and Insurance Asia Awards.