What is Manulife’s strategy in Asia’s post-pandemic growth?

We have clearly defined our strategic position to capture post-pandemic growth by investing strongly in human resources and customers while focusing on immediate opportunities such as the sharp increase in the middle-class in Asia, low insurance penetration, and a lack of life protection solutions in the region.

Manulife is well positioned to take advantage of these opportunities, especially as we work towards meeting the health and retirement needs of our clients across Asia.

Specifically, our solid digitization platform facilitates the goal of developing customers and human resources. Our diversified distribution model is considered one of the strongest in the market.

We also have a leading agency channel, from a focus on the quality of the recruitment process in terms of both scale and training. With a team of experienced consultants and staff and comprehensive insurance solutions, we are rapidly seizing post-pandemic development opportunities and accompanying millions of customers as they improve their lives every day.

As the leader of a company operating in more than 13 Asian countries, what made you choose Vietnam as one of the first destinations?

Manulife is committed to investing in the long-term development of Vietnam. For us, that means investing in people, innovation, services, products, and community initiatives that address important social and economic issues.

Over the past few years, we have also witnessed the strong growth of Manulife Vietnam, maintaining our leadership position in terms of new premiums, including first-half business results in 2022.

What advantages does Vietnam hold in developing the life insurance sector compared to other Asian markets?

Manulife Vietnam is proud to be one of the leading insurance companies in terms of digitalization. We help financial advisors better serve their clients, specifically by digitizing the “touchpoints” where advisors interact with clients and implementing platforms for online sales with automated appraisal processes. The Vietnamese Government is also speeding up support for the digitization process, which is a positive for the insurance industry.

For me, technology offers many opportunities to make insurance more accessible. But besides that, technology also needs to be complemented by human interaction to create a connection. A presence on channels that our customers use every day is very important. Manulife Vietnam is continuing to grow this by focusing on improving the customer journey, ensuring our expert team of consultants provides quality advice and experiences to customers.

What would you suggest a successful health and life insurance company in Vietnam do to gain the trust of consumers?

I believe in the power of culture, and promoting a sustainable culture at Manulife is paramount to success. Culture helps create the conditions for employees to achieve high performance, thereby meeting customer expectations.

To do this, we promote the engagement of staff and financial advisors at Manulife in Vietnam and across Asia. This includes implementing knowledge support tools for employees through the Pursuit online learning platform on LinkedIn and the ManuAcademy platform, a mobile learning management application, to help financial advisors develop their careers.

Effective implementation of these will help us offer the best experiences, products, and consulting services to our customers, which is key to winning their hearts.

In Vietnam, we have structured our operating system so that we can best serve our customers. These changes help us ensure that our systems and processes align with the customer journey, propelling Manulife as a leader in new market share and ranking highly on the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

For us, putting our clients first means focusing heavily on developing our team of financial advisors. Increasing their number, improving their quality, and digitizing the financial advisory team is a priority for Manulife, as this team will ultimately help to better serve our clients.

As the leader in the number of MDRT (Million Dollar Round Table) members in Vietnam and the 12th globally, Manulife Vietnam’s consulting team is striving to achieve even more. We hope to double the number of consultants in the country, and I believe we will achieve this goal.