Sunday Dec 15, 2024
Sunday Dec 15, 2024
Tuesday, 18 October 2022 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
These are indeed unprecedented times in Sri Lanka – with the start of the pandemic which continued to cripple the economy, followed by multifaceted instabilities that further led to economic devastation. Sri Lanka’s ‘new normal’ is seemingly where Sri Lankans are striving to overcome its worst economic impact in its history, from individuals to industries alike.
Thusara Ranasinghe, Associate Director Legal/General Counsel and Company Secretary at AIA Sri Lanka is an expert in Corporate and Insurance Law. He has been at AIA for 14 years with over 19 years’ experience in the legal arena and insurance industry including a two-year engagement in a BPO associated with uninsured loss recoveries in a law firm based in UK. Thusara played an instrumental role in the acquisition of AIA and the project leading to the delisting of the Company from the Colombo Stock Exchange. He was also Chairman of the Legal Advisory Forum of the Insurance Association of Sri Lanka (2014/15).
The insurance industry is no exception and will certainly need to navigate this new landscape carefully. The insurance sector was quick to respond to the pandemic, providing relevant covers and introducing digital capabilities for smoother operations and a better customer experience. While there was sustained growth in the local market in 2021, we have yet to ascertain the aftermath of the current social and political crisis, which would no doubt have impacted this already under-penetrated sector.
World's largest life insurer by market capitalisation and a top player in the local market, AIA Insurance has built a team of strong young leaders to navigate this new and challenging terrain as they usher the company’s trajectory upwards. The team are adamantly pursuing the silver lining as they charter a new course for insurance, embracing the current situation as an opportunity to learn, grow and serve customers better in every way.
Sampath Thushara, the newly appointed Chief Financial Officer at AIA Sri Lanka counts over 18 years of experience within the finance and auditing fields given his work experience in the industries of audit and assurance, apparel, telecommunication, manufacturing, and insurance. Sampath is considered an expert in IFRS 17, given his deep knowledge of the standard and his hands-on experience in leading the adoption of the standard. He brings together his knowledge and expertise in Life Insurance from his current role and in General Insurance from his prior association with the company’s fully owned subsidiary. He has made his contributions to the Sri Lankan insurance industry, as well as the accounting fraternity in general in terms of IFRS 17 and its implementation challenges in the local context.
AIA Associate Director Legal/General Counsel and Company Secretary Thusara Ranasinghe noted the long history of challenges faced by Sri Lankans including a 30-year conflict, the Tsunami , Easter attacks and the COVID pandemic, followed by the current political and economic turmoil, which has time and time again tested our resilience as a nation. “The one key take-away from all of this is ‘uncertainty’ – which is incidentally also the very basis of insurance. Having adequate insurance protection is essential for everyone, especially in the time of uncertainty and crisis like this,” he said.
He noted the role of regulators in such situations, “Our regulator, the Insurance Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (the IRCSL) continues to play a key role in this aspect as it is its primary responsibility to ensure that the insurance industry sustains business through this unprecedented crisis while safeguarding the interests of all the stakeholders, most importantly the customers. They have been proactive in this regard and have taken many measures to ensure the resilience and continuity of the industry while also providing much needed assurance to customers that their hard-earned money is safe with their insurers and that they will get paid their legitimate claims when they are due.”
Senaka Rajapakse, Director Partnership Distribution at AIA Sri Lanka is a professional with extensive experience in sales and marketing in the Life Insurance industry. He has gained a wealth of experience and knowledge while fostering strong relationships across the organisation, during his 22 years of service at AIA. Under his leadership, Partnership Distribution substantially increased its activity, productivity and contribution to the ANP and VONB of the company since 2021.
He further noted, “When you are looking for an insurance partner, especially amidst a financial crisis, you need to be cautious – you must see beyond the mere publicity and marketing campaigns and pay attention to how the financial crisis affected the insurance companies as well. In other countries, we have observed how companies can go bankrupt or out of business during financial crisis and the insurance sector is also susceptible. Insurance companies offer insurance policies for long periods, sometimes 20 to 30 years. Your long-term savings are invested in the life insurance policy. So, you need to be very careful when you select the company that you wish to place your insurance with and also you must keep an eye on its performance throughout the policy term.
“Strong capital structures, exemplary corporate governance practices and a longer history of operations would be key aspects to look at, not to forget the company’s history of facing and surviving previous crises. AIA Sri Lanka for example has an unblemished record of staying strong and stable in the face of any crisis, mainly due to its strong capital foundation and prudent investments, not to forget the backing of multinational giant AIA Group which is the World's largest life insurer by market capitalisation with a history of over 100 years.”
Suresh Edirisinghe, Director Operations at AIA Sri Lanka has been working in the insurance industry for the past 24 years specialising in Risk Management, Insurance Operations, and Customer Experience Management. He was appointed as the Specified Officer of the company since 2016 to oversee the technical aspect of operations. Suresh was instrumental in establishing the Customer Conservation unit of the company which supports customers to revive their policies for which he was awarded the CEO's Special Award in 2019. Digitalisation of the customer journey and transformation of operations towards paperless are being executed under his leadership.
AIA’s new Chief Financial Officer Sampath Thushara agrees that AIA’s prudent financial management has helped keep the company steady despite the ongoing challenges. “Whilst many were curtailing investments, AIA Sri Lanka forged ahead to increase its investments to better equip the company to serve its customers better, including investing in product development, agency training and expansion, digital transformation and digitalised solutions. We have always maintained a prudent approach to financial management of the company, and this holds us in good stead during times of external shocks,” he said.
“We are prudent with our investment management and generate attractive risk commensurate returns. We continue to concentrate our portfolios in government securities and high-quality instruments issued by the top credit quality banks in the country. We don’t invest our conventional life fund investments in quoted shares due to the risks these pose to our policyholders’ assets and these fundamentals help keep us strong, stable and secure.”
He added, “There is clearly a potential for insurance penetration and the increase in customer awareness for protection coverage during challenging times. If we understand the customer behaviour and keep in mind customer convenience, we can swiftly move forwards. At AIA we understand the importance of 'quality of life'.Crises generally create a circular reference to a more vicious cycle unless there is a circuit breaker in between.
Chanaka Liyanage, Deputy Agency Officer/Director Agency at AIA Sri Lanka joined the company in 2019 with 20 years of experience in the banking and financial industry. He was seconded to TATA AIA India in 2019/2020 and was a part of the full time Premier Agency project where TATA AIA India launched a full time Premier Agency in Pan India successfully. He was also instrumental in turning around the AIA Sri Lanka Premier Agency Circle performance and took the initiative to expand the full time Premier Agency across all provinces in Sri Lanka. Further, Chanaka was responsible in driving the digital transformation strategy at Agency distribution including many new initiatives to improve the Digital Sales Management process.
“Insurance is such a circuit breaker that gives you confidence and courage to make your next choice in life. An insurer who has a long heritage and experience together with strong financial strength, robust risk management practices, access to vast pools of financial resources and substantial reinsurance coverage, such as AIA, will make your choice more effective in breaking such a circuit.”
AIA Director Partnership Distribution Senaka Rajapakse noted, “The entire world is at a tipping point and facing a global economic crisis and people have to be more conscious and adapt to new lifestyle changes. Customers need to change in order to face contemporary challenges and it’s certainly not easy. And we, as an insurance partner must focus on understanding these challenges and helping them through it by redesigning our products and processes to assist with these changing needs.”
Hasitha Mapalagama, Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at AIA Sri Lanka has over 14 years of experience in the insurance industry with over 21 years of experience in the fields of Risk, Compliance and Internal Auditing. He is an experienced and collaborative Risk Management, and Compliance expert with thorough, comprehensive and in-depth knowledge in Life Insurance and financial industry. With extensive experience in the fields of Risk Management, Compliance and Internal Auditing, he led the setting-up and integration of the local Compliance function with AIA Group Compliance, at the time of acquisition of AIA Sri Lanka by AIA Group.
He explained, “With the cost-of-living tripling and inflation increasing over 75%, losing one’s income is a scary thought for any family. As an insurance partner we understood our role and responsibility to better prepare our own employees and the community. The partnership distribution channel had an advantage of reaching out to a broader population through its long-term partnerships with the two leading local banks NDB and DFCC bank which was further expanded by recently partnering Sri Lanka’s largest private bank, Commercial Bank. As pioneers in bancassurance in the country, our partnerships are carefully designed to provide tailor-made insurance solutions to the bank’s customers, so they can enjoy insurance in a truly beneficial way.”
He added, “We re-strategised our product portfolio, introducing more long-term benefits, flexible solutions and convenient end-to-end sales processes. We kept our focus on investing in the best technology and in developing our people, while enabling digitally robust processes to further strengthen our banking partner’s confidence in us and providing better convenience for our customers. At AIA we believe that our strength is in our people and the Partnership Distribution channel consists of over 120 individual sales professionals. Our meticulous development plan helped our team reskill themselves to face the current challenges and I am proud to say that as a team we were resilient and adapted to react faster, as we believe that our customer’s peace of mind is the most important thing, and we go above and beyond our call of duty in ensuring this.”
AIA Director Operations Suresh Edirisinghe agreed, “As a key player in the industry we are dutybound to provide the best of service and convenience to our customers during these difficult times. We are constantly striving to provide faster and better customer service, while keeping customer communications digital and paperless, which enables constant and continued contact with customers.”
He pointed out, “Savings and protection are so important in a customer’s life cycle and these aspects are more relevant in the current context where there are several challenges in the market environment such as pandemics, various diseases and economic downturns, etc. Our duty is therefore to provide customers with suitable products for their needs while making the purchasing and servicing processes simpler and faster. AIA has introduced a new array of products to meet customer needs in this regard and have also introduced digital platforms for simple and faster onboarding.
Chalini Gunaratne, AGM – Human Resources at AIA Sri Lanka has over 16 years of experience in the HR field with both local and multinational exposure. Her career starts as a HR Generalist and moves on to a HR Specialist role covering functions related to Recruitment, Learning and Development, Performance Management, Succession Planning, Culture and Engagement whilst gaining experience as a HR Consultant and a HR Business Partner. She is responsible of all Talent Acquisition and Learning and Development strategies for the entire organisation and provides leadership and guidance on the new expansion projects and other strategic drives of the company.
“The Customer Portal and digital payment channels have been introduced to help customers access their policy details, payment details and to pay premiums. Customer Services including re-activating policies have currently been transferred to telephonic processes to make it faster and simpler. Servicing and looking after our valued customers throughout their stay with us is of paramount importance to us. Towards this objective we prioritise providing a better customer experience at every stage of the customer journey while ensuring that their peace of mind is preserved.”
AIA Director Agency/Deputy Chief Agency Officer Chanaka Liyanage noted, “Against the backdrop of a volatile external environment, we identified the challenges that our potential customers may face in making decisions to secure financial protection for themselves and for their families. Towards this end, we launched specific solutions to specifically cater to these protection needs in the form of our products and also deployed a strategy to expand our distribution reach by recruiting over 2,000 new agents and providing them with the required training and knowledge to cater to the needs of our current and potential customers. With the execution of this strategy, we continue to expand our agency force.
“We also identified potential challenges our existing customers may face in continuing to make their premium payments and have deployed initiatives to facilitate standing instruction payments to both our new customers and existing customers. We forged ahead and made significant investments to upgrade our technology platform and launch digitalised solutions for both front-end customer interactions as well as for the back-end service operations, with the objective of better equipping the company to serve our customers better, especially at a time when they are facing many other obstacles in life.”
He empathises on a common plight for many locals. “If you are the breadwinner of your family, you will definitely feel the financial pressure during this crisis. Your regular income will start to drop, and you may have to dip into your hard-earned savings to support increasing health and medical bills for yourself or your family. If you don’t have savings, you may have to depend on your children who are also probably feeling the financial pressure. It is a vicious cycle that life insurance can help by providing financial security that can help cover health and retirement expenses and also provide financial protection for your loved ones when you are no longer around,” he said.
He added, “Our main goal at AIA is to educate today’s customers on the need for life insurance. More than selling products, our mission is to help Sri Lankans be financially protected. We are such an underpenetrated market with a clear need for education on the benefits of life insurance, especially now, more so than ever, considering the heightened levels of inflation. We want to remind Sri Lankans to act today because an affordable life insurance policy is one of the best ways to protect your family in not only good times but more so, during the bad.”
AIA Chief Risk and Compliance Officer Hasitha Mapalagama agreed, “Insurance is one of the main strategies in mitigating risks. Over the years it has benefited corporates and individuals to face the unexpected and overcome difficult situations. Although initially insurance was perceived as a lump sum after death, it evolved over time to provide fully fledged protection solutions to customers for their health, retirement, savings and investments. The current economic and political crisis in the country has impacted many livelihoods with galloping inflation and lack of essential supplies.
“The situation is further exacerbated by soaring interest rates which has seen almost 1,400 bps (one-year rate) rise since March 2022. These have resulted in many households rationalising their expenses as disposable incomes have come down significantly. In addition, medical costs have risen to unmatched levels resulting in making it extremely unaffordable for individuals to seek private medical care. In this situation, the importance of insurance becomes critical.”
He added, “At AIA we have prioritised helping existing customers to ensure they have sufficient cover to afford inflated medical costs while providing solutions to new customers who no longer want to stand in line at already short- supplied government medical facilities. We also help customers build their wealth through savings and investments which gives them future financial strength.
“Of course customers must be careful where they invest their hard-earned money, especially in times of crisis where many macroeconomic fundamentals are volatile. AIA has always made sure that we maintained capital adequacy ratio well above the minimum standards which means that we have a high capacity to withstand risk and also have a prudent investment strategy within a solid governance framework- so customers can rest assured they can trust us to keep their hard-earned money safe.”
AIA Assistant General Manager – Human Resources Chalini Guneratne affirms that AIA’s culture is one which nurtures trust. “Trust is a key part of success for any organisation, especially during times of crisis. At a time when everything is crumbling around them, we want to make sure employees find security at AIA. We strive to provide a safe and caring environment for all our employees, while driving a common vision and inspiring the whole team to move from an “I” to a “We” culture- where all functions work together towards achieving the bigger purpose.
“If 2020 and beyond has taught us anything, it’s that great teams, great leaders, and great organisations are shaped by crises and challenges! We understand that the market needs have changed and will shape ourselves accordingly. This is one of the main reasons we have been recognised as a Great Place to Work for 10 consecutive years and awarded ‘Legend’ status by the Great Place to Work® Institute .”
She elaborated, “In this journey, we as HR leaders need to be a step ahead and prepare the wider organisation. Our HR landscape now embraces new aspects of automation, remote work, flexibility, agility, and resilience while encouraging ownership, accountability, reskilling existing talent and attracting new skills to make AIA ‘future ready’. At AIA we will continue to ‘Believe in Better’ and drive our culture, engagement, development, and rewards to further strengthen our foundation whilst ensuring we are a great place to work then, now and in the future.”
