Philam makes P3-B push to boost sales

One of the largest life insurers in the country will spend P3 billion over the next three years to boost its sales network in an effort to capture a bigger slice of the local market which, company executives said, remained severely underinsured.

In a briefing, Philippine American Life and General Insurance Co. CEO Kelvin Ang said the new investment would result in the hiring of as many as 5,000 “full-time and highly professional leaders“ who, in turn, were expected to have an average of five agents under them, resulting in a 25,000 bump in the insurer’s sales force.

Ang, an executive of Hong Kong-based parent firm AIA who took the Philam helm earlier this year, has a mandate to grow the local business which had slipped in the wake of the global financial crisis a decade ago. That crisis severely affected Philam’s former majority shareholder AIG.

“We see tremendous upside for the local market, especially since we can see a ‘protection gap’ of P1.5 trillion at present,” Ang said, noting the difference between Filipinos’ “insurable” out-of-pocket expenses last year and the actual value that insurance policies covered.

This protection gap, he said, was expected to rise further to P2.7 trillion by 2020.

He said the insurance penetration rate in the country remained in the single digit at less than 2 percent, representing a substantial upside potential for the industry.