Thai Life spurs agents with high income growth target
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THAI LIFE INSURANCE has set an aggressive premium-growth target to encourage its agents, its main sales channels, to increase their efforts, said chief executive officer Apirak Thaipatanakul.
This year, Thai Life targets growth of new-business premium income at Bt17 billion, or 35 per cent, higher than the expectation for the overall market.
The Thai Life Assurance Association last week targeted first-year premium (FYP) growth of 16 per cent to Bt125.1 billion and single-premium growth of Bt68.4 billion, or 10
per cent. With single-premium life insurance, the policyholder pays the full premium amount up front, rather than in instalments.
The growth of new business at Thai Life will mainly be from FYP rather than single premiums as the volumes of the latter type are small. Insurance agents remain the key channels at Thai Life, though bancassurance is becoming a bigger money-maker for the life-insurance industry.
At Thai Life, agents contribute 80 per cent premium income, while 19 per cent comes from bancassurance and the rest from telemarketing. The company prefers to maintain these proportions because agents are the best way to access customers.
Bancassurance
“Bancassurance provides limited growth for us since we cannot force them [bank employees] to sell policies as much as our agents. We have to have a team to work closely with banks in selling policies to the bank customers,” Apirak said.
He said the company would try to maintain double-digit growth of new business for the long term. Last year, new-business premium growth was less than 30 per cent, blamed on the political instability.
The company is training agents upcountry to focus more on foreigners who work in Thailand, preparing for the expected boom from the Asean Economic Community. It is not yet planning to do business in neighbouring countries after Asean integration, but instead will serve foreigners who come into Thailand, especially in border provinces.
However, the company acknowledges that it should build brand awareness outside Thailand, and the best way to do that is to establish representative offices in neighbouring countries. Myanmar should be the first place Thai Life does that.
