Sun Life claims top spot in life insurance sector

MANILA, Philippines—The year 2011 was very good indeed to the Philippine unit of Canadian insurance giant Sun Life Financial.

Last year, Sun Life Financial-Philippines inaugurated its new corporate headquarters in Bonifacio Global City and forged a new joint-venture company called Sun Life Grepa Financial, which is raking in better-than-expected sales.

But the coveted feather in the cap is the feat accomplished by its life insurance arm—Sun Life of Canada (Philippines) Inc.

It collected P13.9 billion worth of premiums in 2011, 31 percent more than the P10.6 billion yielded in 2010, and the highest in the company’s 117 years in the Philippines.

More importantly, the premiums were more than enough to catapult Sun Life to first place in the country’s growing life insurance sector.

Capturing the top spot, however, was years in the making, according to Sun Life CEO Riza Mantaring.

She tells the Inquirer that preparations started back in 2009, when more distribution channels were opened, systems were reviewed and enhanced, improved training and recruitment programs were implemented, and a more aggressive marketing campaign was rolled out to enhance the Sun Life brand in the country.

According to the BS Electrical Engineering graduate of the University of the Philippines, the Sun Life team thought it prudent to adopt a more long-range approach to getting to the top position, so that the gains would be sustainable, and not quick but one-time increase in premiums that would be quickly followed by a drop the following year.

Mantaring says this mindset explains the focus on improving the systems and procedures and the training of Sun Life agents or financial advisors who deal directly with the clients, rather than simple sales rallies to drum up sales.

“We were never about the flash-in-the-pan, we’ve always gone for sustainability,” explains Mantaring.

One concrete example is Sun Life’s “It’s Time” financial literacy campaign to inform Filipinos about investments and the importance of making their money work hard for them.

Mantaring says that based on studies, the campaign that began in 2009 was able to raise Filipinos’ awareness of financial products such as life insurance, thus helping increase the penetration rate of life insurance in the Philippines.

That rate, however, is still very low at just 3 percent for individual life insurance, and 16 percent for group life insurance.

Mantaring says that this only means that the insurance sector still has a large room for growth, thus Sun Life will continue to press on the accelerator to capture an even bigger slice of the growing market.

Sun Life feels that it is in a good position to do just that because of the increasing affluence of Filipinos as well as the greater awareness of the need for life insurance.

“The life insurance sector has been growing at a good pace. More people are starting to buy. And this year, we still think that there will be growth, even if 2012 will be a little bit more unpredictable because of a lot of external factors like the turmoil in Europe,” says Mantaring.

Nevertheless, Mantaring is bullish over the prospects of the Philippines, believing that it has solid fundamentals and will continue to grow on the back of remittances and the government’s pledge to increase spending on infrastructure.

The Philippines has also captured the attention of Sun Life’s global headquarters, with Sun Life Financial global president and CEO Dean Connor and Sun Life Financial Asia president Kevin Strain coming over this week for the Asia Leadership Team (ALT) meeting, which will be held in the Philippines for the first time.

About 50 delegates from Sun Life (North America and Asia) will be in town to discuss plans as well as to check out the operations in the Philippines, which Mantaring says will maintain its healthy pace of growth.

“We will just have to continue to execute our growth strategy,” says Mantaring, and this means looking for more channels to distribute its products—life insurance as well as mutual funds—and developing new ones to attract more Filipinos to its fold.

As Mantaring says, Sun Life has every intention of holding on to the lead.