In 2020, despite the global COVID-19 pandemic, Fubon Life Insurance experienced significant growth. Its total assets surpassed NT$5trn (£128bn), and its annual after-tax net profit reached NT$61.04bn (£1.5bn), a remarkable increase of 130 per cent compared to the previous year.
Fubon Life, a leading brand in the Taiwan insurance market, achieved an overall premium income surpassing NT$540bn (£13.9bn). This success can be attributed to the support of policyholders and the trust and affirmation of investors. Fubon Life’s strategy revolves around a flexible product portfolio and diversified distribution channels. The company focuses on promoting insurance protection, continuous evolution, pursuing excellence, and practising the vision of enriching people’s lives with positive energy.
Benson Chen, President of Fubon Life, emphasized the significance of insurance in Taiwanese people’s lives, particularly in the face of challenges such as an ageing society, evolving insurance products, and the COVID-19 pandemic. As Fubon Financial Holdings celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, Fubon Life, as a subsidiary, remains committed to leveraging insurance protection, integrating resources through its ‘Five Ring Strategy,’ and upholding the principles of ‘abiding by the law,’ ‘treating customers fairly,’ and ‘implementing ESG.
These Fubon Life’s principles are cultivated within the company’s culture to ensure ongoing growth. The company’s brand has a significant impact, showcasing its wide influence. Additionally, Fubon Life employs a stable layout strategy to enhance its presence in overseas markets, aiming to become a leading financial institution in Asia.
Promoting business development
Despite the challenging business environment, Fubon Life’s tied agent manpower remained stable in 2020. With nearly 500 agencies in Taiwan, serving over 4.81 million policyholders nationwide, Fubon Life plans to recruit 6,000 new tied agents this year. To attract young people and those interested in the life insurance industry, Fubon Life leverages cross-selling resources and has developed a customer-oriented process with financial holding characteristics. Additionally, they have created a digital event management platform called ‘FBFLi System’ to facilitate a stable and interactive relationship between tied agents and customers, allowing them to track their activity over time.
In addition, Fubon Life also continues to promote the insurance policy review service, scientifically analyses the protection gap through the policy review system to help the policyholders improve the protection plan, and effectively increase production capacity and retention rate while improving the service capacity of the tied agents.
Fubon Life has embraced the digital era by integrating online and offline insurance application services. This move aims to enhance their digital business momentum and bridge the gap between virtual and physical channels. Through effective promotional strategies, Fubon Life has secured the top market share in 2020. In the coming year, the company will prioritize the promotion of protection-oriented insurance products. They will introduce user-friendly, online-applicable options like short-term life insurance to cater to the consumption habits of online users and provide customers with quick and essential protection.
Preparing for retirement
Facing the super-aged society in 2025, Fubon Life has launched the ‘Four Accounts of Retirement’ insurance protection project that covers medical care, long-term care, pension, and liability protection. It will also cooperate with the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) to launch the retirement preparation platform in July this year and continue to raise public awareness for retirement preparation. In addition to medical and health insurance, long-term care insurance and quasi-long-term care insurance, Fubon Life also actively develops retirement-related insurance products to meet the needs of local citizens.
On the other hand, public awareness of health protection has risen significantly due to the pandemic. The market for Fubon Life’s spillover policy is dominated by young people under the age of 35 in 2020, and there are more female policyholders than male policyholders. This shows that the younger generation is gradually accepting the concept of buying insurance for the promotion of good health.
Fubon Life also launched the market’s first diabetes spillover insurance policy, which is the industry’s best-selling diabetes insurance policy. It provides options for people with diabetes who were not easily covered by medical insurance in the past. This year there is also a focus on specific health issues to design and launch insurance products that meet the needs of the public. The policy design encourages policyholders to develop health management habits to achieve the substantial effect of disease prevention.
A people-oriented service
Fubon Financial Holdings’ core corporate values are ‘integrity, sincerity, professionalism and innovation.’ With ‘integrity’ as the top priority, Fubon Life believes that it is necessary to implement the principle of fair hospitality and internalise the concept into its corporate culture. Only when corporate culture takes shape can all employees share common beliefs and behaviours. These principles should be implemented from top to bottom to directly serve the company’s internal operations and external interaction with customers.
Caring for disadvantaged groups and striving to promote inclusive finance, Fubon Life gives full play to its functions and values, fully responding to government policies, and providing basic protection for the economically disadvantaged population through the design and promotion of micro-insurance products. The number of people benefitting from these products in 2020 has reached nearly 25,000. For senior citizens and people with limited mobility, Fubon Life has set up a toll-free service hotline at its 24/7 customer service centre, which is dedicated to serving people over 65 years of age. The process is never rushed and time is taken to explain the services in full and all policy-related services are also provided in dialects according to language preference.
Improving service accessibility
Fubon Life continues to cooperate with the Life Insurance Association to promote the ‘Insurance Blockchain Alliance Technology Application Sharing Platform.’ It also uses the policyholders’ usage scenarios as the basis for the application of insurance technology. Fubon Life chooses technology with a lower usage threshold to provide easy accessibility to policyholders of all ages. For example, policyholders can use LINE Pay, a social platform with a high penetration rate, to pay the premium or access related security services through mobile phone number MID authentication. They can also walk into convenience stores (such as FamilyMart and HiLife) to complete the verification and certification process of automatic premium payment deduction from the bank account.
Policyholders who live overseas or in remote areas can complete the claim application through the live broadcast feature of their mobile phones. The policyholders can receive the insurance benefit as soon as the same day of application. The use of Insurtech has also played a key role during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fubon Life has launched the ‘Health Checkup Alternative Programme’ with the video survival survey service. During the pandemic prevention period, policyholders do not need to go to a medical institution for a health check and can apply to conduct an assessment through video conferencing to reduce the need to visit a medical institution and in turn reduce the risk of infection.
ESG leads the way
An important policy of Fubon Life’s sustainable operation is ESG. In the promotion of green finance, through the four low-carbon strategies of green procurement, friendly workplaces, paperless services, and environmental protection, Fubon Life will work with policyholders to fully implement green actions from within the company. In addition, in terms of green investment, the company will make every effort to support and invest in the 5+2 industrial transformation plan and public construction projects. In 2020, Fubon Life invested more than NT$500bn (£12.8bn) in total to demonstrate corporate influence and focus on the sustainable development of Taiwan’s society.
The 5+2 industrial transformation plan includes industries such as smart machinery, Asian Silicon Valley (IOT), green energy, biomedical, national defence, new agriculture and the circular economy.
In terms of social care, Fubon Life continues to care for the elderly with dementia and received responses from five counties and cities to join and support the service of giving free bracelets after confirming the diagnosis of dementia. With the cooperation of more than 100 hospitals in Taiwan, the chances of finding lost patients with dementia were significantly increased. This year, the ‘Smart Search Project’ will be promoted to make good use of technology to present humanised and localised care services.
In addition, Fubon Life also strongly supports Taiwan’s four major marathons and inter-departmental college basketball tournaments. The UBA tournament that Fubon Life has sponsored for five consecutive years has become the most popular college sports event in Taiwan. By supporting sports events, the firm intends to promote active lifestyles and strengthen public health awareness.
Fubon Life Insurance has received numerous accolades for its services. It has been named ‘Taiwan’s Best Insurance Company’ by World Finance nine times and recognized as the top insurance brand among the top 100 insurance brands worldwide by Brand Finance. Additionally, Fubon Life has won the ‘Insurance Quality Award’ for four consecutive years in categories such as highest reputation, best insurance agent, best claims service, and most recommended. The company has also been consistently chosen as the most aspiring employer for finance and insurance major graduates for 11 consecutive years. These achievements highlight Fubon Life’s commitment to sustainable operations and professional insurance services, earning the trust and admiration of the public.