THE new chairman of the insurance technology (InsurTech) committee of the Financial Technology Philippines Association aims to foster stronger collaboration among insurance industry stakeholders to be able to cover more Filipinos with some form of insurance.
“We are hoping that we can on-board more services so that it can be easier for customers to access our products,” Melissa Henson told reporters on Wednesday.
According to Henson, chief marketing officer of the Manufacturers Life Insurance Co. (Phils.) Inc. (Manulife Philippines), the move is not only seen to increase the number of Filipinos covered by insurance but it will also increase financial literacy. She added the committee headed by Manulife Philippines aims to educate and communicate with insurance stakeholders, as well as help more people embrace a culture of innovation.
“We’ve been a member of the organization since 2018 and the interest for us is really because our goal as a company is to try to make insurance easy for customers, to make our customers have the easiest time working with Manulife because we want to be a digital leader,” Henson added. “To be able to do that, it’s very important for us to be able to learn new technologies, emerging technologies, and also gain access to new solutions that we can potentially use to make our customer experience better and easier.”
Manulife Philippines hopes to achieve this by leveraging its regional and global presence to provide access to actionable information, exploring joint industry research and studies, as well as using technology to foster financial awareness and promote the importance of insurance.
Based on the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas 2017 Financial Inclusion Survey, only 18 percent or 12.3 million of the country’s adult population have insurance, which means that insurance companies still need to cover 82 percent of the adult population.
“What we hope to do as the Chair of the InsurTech committee is foster collaboration across the industry so that we can increase insurance penetration and adoption and accessibility of insurance in the market,” she said. “So we hope to be able to foster all these practice sharing, collaborate more as an insurance community so that we can cocreate and find solutions that would really demystify insurance for Filipinos and make it more accessible.”