Why are the larger players in life insurance like Great Eastern, AIA, Prudential, HSBC choosing not to be on MoneyOwl?

Hi Anonymous,

As a matter of business strategy, some insurers prefer to stick to their agency force in the main, because of channel conflict. Thus you would see that they would sell mainly through their own agency force or nowadays, their own "tied financial advisers", so it is not really about MoneyOwl.

DIYInsurance (the precursor of MoneyOwl's insurance advisory servce) have also previously had the experience whereby an insurer would only work with us if its quotes were not being compared online, for competitive reasons. Our comparitor has 500,000 quotes.
Nonetheless, MoneyOwl has a good panel of 7 insurers, including the latest addition, FWD, among whom there are more than enough excellent products to implement the protection our clients need.

Hope this clarifies!

Hi there,

If you do look at the MAS data on insurers in Singapore, you would be able to see that the bigger insurers have established their distribution channels, and have significant market capitalisation in Singapore.

Ergo, from a business standpoint, while the big insurers may benefit from this 3rd party distribution channel, it will cannibalise the smaller insurers. Smaller insurers need to onboard more clients in order to build a significant risk pool, to hedge against a huge claims event on the population.

Most insurers opt for a penetration pricing strategy, however in the long run, bigger players who have market dominance and strong brandings, will prevail. They are better equipped to maintain competitve pricing, while being able to absorb volatility in the form of premium increases due to claims experience.

Hope i was able to answer your queries!

*This is an opinion piece, based on the data, and the views reflected are of my own.