Sun Life to expand BPO operations in Philippines

Global insurance giant Sun Life of Canada plans to expand its business process outsourcing operations and possibly set up a call center in the Philippines, taking advantage of the country’s English-speaking human resources.

Sun Life has close to 200 seats in the country handling the information technology requirements of the firm’s operations in the United States and Canada.

“We’re expanding our BPO and potentially moving our call center offices here,” Sun Life of Canada (Philippines) president Riza Mantaring said in an interview on Friday.

The plan was to expand the number of BPO seats in the country by 500 to cater to the IT requirements of Sun Life and Canada, Mantaring said.

“Sun Life certainly has favorable impressions of the Philippines and we expect that the investments will continue,” Mantaring said.

The Philippines is the second outsourcing hub of Sun Life in Asia. The financial giant operates about 1,000 BPO seats in India. Outside of Asia, Sun Life has an outsourcing hub in Ireland.

Mantaring said Sun Life would study the best vehicle for its prospective call center hub in the country, which she said would hopefully rise by next year. “They are already looking at how to set it up,” she said.

The Philippine unit of Sun Life recently moved to its new 14-story headquarters in Fort Bonifacio. Sun Life itself occupies 7 ½ floors while the remaining 6 ½ floors are for rent, attracting multinational giants like Nokia and Philips. The building is expected to be fully occupied in a few months.

“Our timing has been very fortunate because when we finished, demand was very good,” she said.

Apart from investing in BPO and the new building, Sun Life also recently bought into the Yuchengcos’ insurance unit Grepalife, thus acquiring a platform for bancassurance, or the cross-selling of insurance products using bank branches. In this partnership, Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. will be the vehicle in selling variable unit-linked insurance (VUL).

VUL, a hybrid between a mutual fund and life insurance, becomes variable as investment returns are dependent on the market performance of the fund where the premium is invested.

In 2007 or before the US subprime crisis, Mantaring said VUL comprised 90 percent of the company’s sale of protection products. During the 2008-2009 period, there was some shift in preference back to traditional life insurance, splitting the business segments evenly.

But this year, even as the financial markets have remained very volatile, Mantaring said VUL has become the dominant segment again, accounting for about 80 percent of the business.

Mantaring said she saw a lot of potential for Sun Life to grow the business especially because only 14 percent of Filipinos have insurance coverage, including group insurance. Individual insurance penetration, however, was much meager at 4 percent.

Mylene Lopa, Sun Life’s chief marketing officer in the Philippines, said the company’s financial literacy program was starting to bear fruit as more than 60 percent of respondents in a recent survey were now thinking of financial planning.