Where Innovation Meets Legacy In Wealth And Insurance

Asia’s unprecedented wave of wealth creation and transfer is reshaping the future of the global insurance industry. In this episode of Reinventing Insurance, Edward Moncreiffe, CEO Insurance at HSBC Group, joins our host Paul Ricard to explore emerging market opportunities and the biggest macroeconomic trends redefining the region’s sector. Based in Hong Kong, Edward draws on nearly two decades of experience working across multiple continents. He articulates a clear vision of the insurance industry’s future in Asia, marked by significant demographic shifts, a rich cultural landscape, and the imperative for digital transformation.

Edward’s insights provide valuable guidance for insurance and financial services leaders to navigate market complexities while remaining focused on customer needs and sustainable growth. He sheds light on the convergence of wealth management and insurance solutions and where this is leading to more comprehensive insurance, investment, and health insurance offerings, as well as fueling deeper engagement with customers.

In this episode, Edward and Paul also share perspectives on:

• Leveraging generative artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation for customer engagement and service models.
• Significant wealth transfer opportunities for insurers to serve legacy planning needs and the changing demographic shifts as older generations retire.
• Sustainable growth opportunities for insurance carriers by reshaping their technology, distribution strategies, and strengthening relationships with distribution partners.
• The lasting resilience and balance of face-to-face distribution alongside digital servicing.
• Building a strong organizational culture focused on talent development and employee empowerment which leads to improved performance and innovation.
• Vibrant and emerging opportunities in Hong Kong as it becomes a major global insurance powerhouse amid geopolitical and economic shifts.

This episode is part of our Reinventing Insurance series that explores best practices for taking a CustomerFirst approach to innovation within insurance. Throughout this series, host Paul Ricard discusses lessons, challenges, and new ways of working with guests who will share their first-hand experiences.

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Mega trends shaping the future of the insurance industry

Paul Ricard: Welcome to Reinventing Insurance. Today, I’m pleased to welcome Edward Moncreiffe, who is the Group CEO of HSBC Life. Welcome, Ed.

Edward Moncreiffe: Thank you for having me, Paul.

Paul: Ed, I have to tell you, I feel like I’m braving the weather today to be with you. We’re in Hong Kong, and it’s typhoon season. I think we’re somewhere between an amber and a red storm right now.

Edward: It’s black rain outside, which is why we look as we do, right?

Paul: Yeah, so hopefully we’re obviously safe here. We’ll see how the rest of the day turns out. Without further ado, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey in the insurance industry, Ed?

Edward: Sure. First of all, thank you for having me. It’s my first podcast, so go easy on me. I started 19 years ago as an insurance broker at a company called HSBC Insurance Brokers and Lloyd’s of London, the old HSBC Gibbs business, which HSBC had purchased, I think, in the late 70s, before it even bought Midland Bank, to get a foothold in the London market. I had tried and failed to be a journalist, which was my dream when I was younger.

Paul: There must be a dream now for you to be on a podcast.

Edward: You would have thought these things would have existed 19 years ago; maybe careers would have panned out very differently. But I realized I wasn’t very good at writing, and there really wasn’t much money in it for a 22-year-old junior sports reporter at the Daily Telegraph.

So, the job I managed to land was on the graduate scheme of an insurance broker. I spent my first couple of years in Lloyd’s of London placing various risks — mainly marine, cargo, energy, aviation — and doing the ferrying jobs that junior brokers would do, shuttling to and from Leadenhall Market for liquid and refreshments. After that, I was taken by the group, by the HSBC Group, to head office to work in strategy and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) for a while. I spent some time in Ireland running our reinsurance company during the crisis and exiting some of the liabilities and risks we had accumulated there. I spent some time in Brazil running our pensions business, which was a fascinating time. Then I moved to Hong Kong. I left Copacabana Beach on New Year’s Day with my wife in January 2016, and 36 hours later, we turned up in Hong Kong. I ran our insurance company here — the life and health company — for seven and a half years. It was a fabulous time, and we created a very strong market-leading franchise. Then, in the first quarter of last year, I became the global CEO for our insurance franchise.

It’s been a really interesting journey across multiple jurisdictions and a prolonged shift from non-life to life, from London to Hong Kong. I’ve learned a little over the years but have been privileged to learn from many very smart people around the world. Hopefully, maybe one day someone will say the same about me. Still got a long way to go.

Paul: Congrats on the latest role opportunity. I was going to say you’ve seen one company, one group, but many different facets of the insurance industry in the process. Tell us a little about your current role and about HSBC Life as well. What’s the scope? What does it cover? What’s a day in your life as the Group CEO for HSBC Life?

Edward: Sure. I’ll steal a memorable TripAdvisor review of the Victoria and Albert Museum café in London.

Paul: I thought you were going to say something about HSBC Life.

Edward: They’ve said this is one of the greatest cafés in the world with a nice museum attached to it. That’s how I see my role. Obviously, we’re part of one of the world’s largest financial organizations — a US$3 trillion balance sheet across around 60-odd markets around the world — a real financial behemoth. I’m responsible for all of our insurance operations, which are predominantly in Asia, where we are leading. We are the number one life and health insurer in Hong Kong. We own 100% our businesses in Macau, Mainland China, and Singapore. We have a very large joint venture in India. We also have businesses in Bermuda, Mexico, and across Europe, and where we don’t underwrite or manufacture, we are obviously a distributor as a bank, as a licensed intermediary. I have accountability for that. The HSBC Life business has about US$120 billion of assets. It’s a big business. If you look at our Q1 results for the group, you can see we’re generating US$1 billion of new business contractual service margin (CSM) — that’s deferred International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) profits from new business. It’s growing very fast. We’re a key growth engine for the group, capitalizing particularly in this part of the world on the wealth creation, wealth transfer, and wealth growth happening in these economies and societies.

Paul: Let’s start talking about the macro trends. I’d be very keen to hear from your standpoint, obviously maybe focusing on Asia. What are some of the biggest macro trends you’ve seen reshaping the insurance industry landscape from a demand standpoint in the last few years? Obviously, a lot has been happening with China — the rebalance between China and the rest of the region. I’d love to get your views on that. What else has been really top of mind and the biggest influences from your standpoint?

Edward: Sure. I think “macro trend” is the right way to frame this. We’re, as an industry, not a reactionary industry. When we behave that way, we get into trouble. We are a long-term anticipatory industry, and it is the macro trend that drives our agenda.

I’m a big believer in demographic destiny, particularly for life and health. If you look at the US market as an example, there’s massive growth coming from retirement annuities. You don’t need a crystal ball — just a basic grasp of demographics to figure out that the baby boomer generation would be coming to the end of their accumulation phase and going into decumulation.

We see similar, not the same but similar, dynamics in Asia. What’s really interesting, particularly in places like China, is the first-generation wealth creators — literally the first families, entrepreneurs, business owners, patriarchs, and matriarchs who have created significant wealth — reaching an age where wealth transfer and legacy have come to the forefront. You have to be careful about stereotyping and overgeneralizing, but one thing I’ve seen very differently in the East and the West is the concept of legacy. It’s all-encompassing, particularly in certain Asian cultures. It’s not just about accumulating or consuming all of my wealth until it’s gone; it’s really about transferring wealth. We’re seeing massive pools of wealth looking to be transferred from the first generation to the second and sometimes even third generation in Asia. This is an amazing tailwind for us as an insurance industry. The fundamental purpose of our contracts is to transfer wealth between an insured and a beneficiary, and our products and solutions provide many advantages as to why that’s a good choice today.

First, I’d say for the aging population in Asia, particularly the aging of first-generation wealth creators, it’s all about this tidal wave of wealth creation and wealth transfer.

The second thing, more recent and seen really in the last five to 10 years rather than the past 20 to 30 years, is the internationalization of wealth and financial planning, and the role of life insurance within that. We sit here in Hong Kong, an international financial center. Last year, our Hong Kong business wrote insurance contracts on people from 50 different countries of residences. Our Singapore business is very similar. The ability now for wealth to flow across markets and for estate and legacy planning to be carried out across markets is really interesting.

If we look at the three major flows particularly of interest to me and my business, it is the Greater China flow, which largely but not exclusively comes to Hong Kong; the ASEAN flow, with huge wealth accumulated in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, largely but not exclusively going to Singapore; and then the Middle East and the NRI — the non-resident Indian population — which goes to Bermuda and in some parts of Singapore and Hong Kong as well. It is demographics around aging, wealth transfer, and internationalization of wealth.

Paul: I totally hear you. The aging generation is bringing it back to the scale and growth of that need. You talked about internationalization. One thing I’m curious about is how you see the needs having evolved. You talked a lot about first-generation wealth. How would you address the needs of the person from 10 or 20 years ago versus now? How has it evolved? Is it more complex? Does it require much more tailored propositions for very different personas?

Edward: Very good question. Maybe I’d answer it in two ways — give a bit of a cop-out answer. The answer is kind of yes and no.

On the intermediary and advice side, absolutely. There is now a very clear differentiation between advisory and distribution. People have been predicting the decline of tied agencies in Asia forever, and it hasn’t happened. I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon because there are very deep-rooted cultural and community factors that will sustain that. But what we’ve seen is the emergence of a level of tailorization. One of your businesses is a good partner of ours; Mercer PCS is an example of that. You do need a specific level of intellectual capital and ability to manage and advise on wealth and asset allocation and everything that goes with that. As part of a bank, that also gives us a competitive advantage because people typically look to us for things like asset allocation. We’ve been advertising our internationality for 30 years. This is an inherent source of strength.

On the product side, I don’t think I’ve seen massive shifts in product. Yes, we’ve seen the emergence of more index-linked products, more exotic linked solutions with various caps and collars, derivatives, and everything else, but it’s nothing that hasn’t existed in the West for a number of years. As insurers, we tend to — apologies to my product colleagues — sometimes overplay our product innovation. Frankly, within insurance, innovation may not always be the best thing.

What I’d say is the key trend I’ve seen in the past five to six years is a flight to quality, a flight to risk aversion, because this has been an enormously turbulent time over the past 10 years across the world, particularly in Asia. The way COVID landed, and some of the trade and geopolitical challenges that have manifested over the past eight to 12 years, have reinforced this. What you haven’t seen in most parts of Asia, which you did see in the West, particularly in the US, was massive public market valuation growth. The S&P is trending at like two times what it was 10 years ago. I look at the Hang Seng Index; it’s still down on where it was in 2019. If you look at property prices across Greater China and most of Asia, again. Many consumers and savers in Asia are wrestling with very different dynamics than people in the West. Insurance continues to over-index as a safe haven, something which will not lose you money, something which can offset negative spreads or negative equity you’re getting elsewhere in your wealth portfolio.

I have seen products start to take significantly different asset allocations. The way insurers, perhaps somewhat similar to the US, have started to include much larger allocations to private markets in how they manage their balance sheets, their general account products, and how they are then able to offer customers more illiquid, long-term, better-yielding options. That’s a very important trend in Asia. In the absence of a massive re-rating of stock markets or properties, which are the other two alternative wealth accumulation vehicles in Asia, you have to be pretty bullish that the growth of insurance as a preferred financial product will continue for some time.

Paul: That makes a lot of sense. You use the word wealth a lot. I always joke that if you ask five different experts in wealth management for the definition of wealth management, they may give you different answers. One question for you: I heard you mentioned aging and almost talked about a loose correlation between an aging population and increasingly wealthy pools of populations in need of insurance. If you move beyond that, thinking about the mass market or mass affluence, the younger generations, what trends are you seeing there? How do you see the insurance needs there?

Edward: To my point around losing bets against agency and tied distribution, there’s a big contrast, in my view, between the West and the East on this. In many parts of the West, insurance has become either a luxury good — you need to be a certain wealth to benefit from the fiscal or scale advantages it brings — or it’s mandatory. It’s like tax. You just have to do it, whether it’s a pension or motor insurance. That’s why the old jokes about dinner parties in London where you never want to say you work in insurance because people see it as either a luxury good or a tax. Both have social connotations.

But in Asia, if I may be so bold, insurance is still a very aspirational, socially respected, and socially essential means of wealth accumulation. I can’t think of a single city or country in this part of the world where you don’t have a sizable part of the community who works for or with the insurance industry. Hong Kong is a great example. People have this image of Hong Kong as owners of skyscrapers and capital markets, but 3.5% of the population sells insurance — about 120,000 licensed intermediaries in this city. That is not uncommon in other cities, both developed and developing, in Asia.

Insurance intermediation in Asia and in urban Asia has become a way to serve the wealth accumulation needs of the younger population, the more mass population. On that basis, insurance is deeply rooted in society. Everyone has a family member or friend who works in insurance, sells insurance, or is an agent at XYZ or broker ABC. It is a very socially accepted and preferred vehicle, trusted on that basis because it has human and familial instincts.

The second point I mentioned earlier is important: Alternative mechanisms for wealth accumulation have failed to preserve wealth. Every market in Asia has been through numerous stock market crashes, economic volatility, and property booms and busts. Insurance is a safe haven, the calm in the storm. In high-savings cultures like Asia, that will continue. Frankly, the only thing the insurance industry has to fear, and the one thing we should be so focused on, is making sure we don’t trip ourselves up, which is largely going to be conduct, maybe solvency, asset-liability matching, and other things. But the biggest risk to our own inexorable growth in this part of the world is ourselves.

Paul: By the way, speaking of Hong Kong, it’s obviously a major global insurance hub, as you were talking about, with a very special role. There’s obviously been a lot happening. I would be curious to hear your view on how Hong Kong is evolving and where you see things going in the coming years in the region and globally when it comes to the insurance industry.

Edward: I’m very pro-Hong Kong. It’s been my home for nearly a decade. My kids were born here. I used to chair the Insurance Federation here. Hong Kong’s life market, frankly, is a bit of a unicorn. I say that because I think it’s the most penetrated market on earth. It’s the highest density insurance market on earth, but it’s also one of the fastest growing markets on earth. It’s not rocket science. It’s because you have tens and tens, arguably 100-plus million of emerging affluent and all the way up to ultra-high-net-worth Mainland Chinese. The Hong Kong life insurance industry, I think, has developed over time very successfully to go beyond its natural borders. I don’t just mean geographic — obviously, for regulatory and legal reasons — but in terms of its products, which have become genuine wealth management products.

If you had looked at the market 30 years ago, this was a market selling term life and mortgage assurance and everything else. But if you look at what the market sells now, these are wealth accumulation, wealth decumulation, wealth transfer, long-term care — every single need, whether for retirement, education, legacy, or protection, can now be met pretty adequately  and successfully by the life insurance industry in Hong Kong.

If I look at the Greater Bay Area, for example, there are 83 million people. It’s more than the population of the UK. And it’s increasingly a common market. There’s freedom of movement of people, goods, and services. The volumes that Hong Kong can still serve as an international financial capital from the Greater Bay Area, from Mainland China, from Asia — because it’s not just China, although China is the lion’s share — make this market very attractive now. It can’t get complacent.

When I used to run the Federation, we spent a lot of time with government and regulators saying Hong Kong has many natural competitive advantages: the rule of law and contract law that’s been here for many years, which is the basis of any insurance industry; the English language, the language of business; and the geographical proximity, being the bridge between China and the world. All three of those things can weaken over time or be shocked by competitive markets and jurisdictions. But as long as Hong Kong continues to place emphasis on its stability — its political and legal stability and reliability — it is where global capital comes to do business. As long as it preserves that international business strength and takes advantage of that bridge into and out of China, I think Hong Kong is going to be very successful.

It is now very much a life and health market. Property and casualty (P&C) would be the flip side, frankly. Despite having competitive advantages around large, massive trading ports and significant freight and cargo volumes, Hong Kong never managed to evolve its ancillary insurance industry — P&C, marine, aviation, and everything else — in a way it could have. Now it’s very difficult because once an ecosystem is created, whether that be Lloyd’s of London, Bermuda, or Singapore for this line of business, it’s very difficult for other markets to catch up.

So, with Hong Kong, it is a lopsided market. My personal view — and I’m not going to make myself popular with everyone — is that it will continue to be more and more lopsided over time and will be a life, investment, and health market.

Paul: Very interesting. Shifting gears a little, we started to get into this. We were talking about the evolution of industry and the ecosystem itself. I’d love for you to elaborate on what we were starting to discuss earlier in terms of how you see the overall insurance ecosystem evolving. In particular, how carriers are evolving their value proposition, distribution strategies, and relationships with distribution partners. You hinted that it varies depending on the part of the market you’re after. We’d love to get some of your views on that.

Edward: Lots of views. I think distribution has not evolved in Asia to the extent that people thought it would. I’m not just talking about tied channels, but generally. It hasn’t been shocking. Many said digital would take over. It hasn’t. Culturally and from a complexity perspective, this is still an advised, face-to-face driven industry.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for digital to play. I’m a big believer in the omni-channel model. I always say we have an insurance company in your pocket because with our mobile banking apps, our two million policyholders in Asia can do anything they want with their insurance with their mobile phone. Are they going to apply for universal life policies on their mobile banking app? It seems unlikely. Digital has become much more of a servicing and engagement capability rather than a sales or distribution capability.

We haven’t seen much integration or value chain integration between distribution and manufacturing — some of it for regulatory reasons, some because capital has, as in parts of the West, very clearly bifurcated between distribution and manufacturing.

Our view is that our ability to provide a one-stop shop — maybe not be the right word — but our ability to own the value chain where we can and choose to give us massive and unreplicable competitive advantages versus pure-play peers who play in particular segments.

I’ll give you a recent example. We launched a new index universal life product in Hong Kong this week. Great products: cap and collar, S&P, Hang Seng Index, gold indexes. What’s interesting is every part of the value chain is managed by HSBC, and it’s written on HSBC Life paper. The indexes are provided by HSBC Asset Management, custody by HSBC Security Services, derivatives by HSBC Global Markets, and distribution through HSBC Private Bank. Our ability to own the value chain, price the value chain, and between different sectors subsidize it rather than compete, gives us the opportunity to reflect that in higher returns on capital for shareholders or better pricing for customers. That’s really exciting. There’ll be more to come on how we can configure genuinely unreplicable solutions. The big question then becomes: who do you pass that on to — shareholders, customers, intermediaries, or all?

Paul: You obviously have the ability to own the value chain where you choose. There seem to be more examples of this coming up. What do you think is the hardest part for some of your competitors to replicate? If someone were to assemble the right sum of parts with the right partnerships, what do you think is the hardest part for them to replicate that would be unique to your group?

Edward: Good question. I’m going to try to answer with a terrible metaphor. I have a 6-year-old son obsessed with Lego, and my house is covered in Lego. Anyone can build Lego if you have all the pieces and instructions. But if you don’t have the instructions and all the pieces, it’s a lot harder.

I think the challenge is procuring the various components of the value chain with a commensurate level of risk appetite. When every player in the value chain has their own minimum hurdles, you get into a value capture conversation rather than value creation. That’s the hardest part. It’s not that it can’t be done; there are many examples of great partnerships, including one of your sister companies. We have great partnerships with third parties, which will be critical to our future, but not all of them work. You’re inherently geared towards supply-demand dynamics and negotiations.

Even if you land at that sweet spot where everyone wins, the time to get to the market is significantly longer, and opportunity costs are higher. Using Hong Kong as an example, there’s a reason no one else has been able, since regulation changes, to release a genuine universal life legacy protection plan at our speed — we have all the pieces of the Lego box and the instruction manual. That doesn’t mean we always get it right, and sometimes we end up building the wrong things. But time to market and the ability to work towards a common, consistent return on capital or internal rate of return (IRR) or risk-weighted return rather than trading off constituent parts is key.

Paul: Going back to the digital front, I have to throw in AI at some point. You said earlier we haven’t seen a massive shock to distribution in the insurance industry in the East. You also mentioned that digital is less about going hard at digital as a channel on its own but more about servicing. If I fast forward five years, how do you see that evolving? We talked about omni-channel. How do you see the role of digital evolving and the role of an agent or a relationship manager?

Edward: Timely question. With the insanely fast developments in AI and large language models over the past couple of years, this is a tipping point. I do think things may change quickly.

We’ve been using AI for years; its core to our pricing. We run incredibly complex data-driven models and algorithms every day on the liability side. We are not so much on distribution — now we are, because we have many copilot-type tools. How do we make our agents in Singapore, bankers in Hong Kong, brokers in China more productive? There are many off-the-shelf tools we can use so that, before you meet with Paul, while on the train or in the car, you can have a more informed meeting because you can scrape huge amounts of detail about Paul, markets, and the world to have a better, more productive client meeting.

We see AI as a copilot for our supply chain, distributors, and intermediaries. What may change is it becoming a copilot for buyers, consumers, and customers. If customers around the world and customers in Asia, now can use Google, Gemini, ChatGPT, or others to help them choose the right hotel when they go on holiday in Thailand, or to help them book the right restaurant that they’re looking for in a particular city, why wouldn’t they use these tools to plan for the future, buy insurance, select retirement funds, or choose medical insurance partners? Why wouldn’t they? We need to be aware that our customers may change, and it may happen overnight. As we’ve seen in other industries, it may go overnight, and we need to be ready for that.

Paul: I’ll share a couple of hypotheses with you that I’d love your take on.

My first hypothesis is that people who manage to stay ahead are those who are flexible and nimble enough to adapt to new tools and technologies, constantly curious and integrating them into their workflow. It’s not once and done; we’re moving from binary to quantum shifts.

The other point, linked to your point about ChatGPT becoming an insurance adviser, is that in insurance, we’re still at the “point in time” engagement, and there’s engaging at the right moments. But is there a way — whether wealth management or financial wellness — to be truly “always on”, providing the right guidance and perspectives? Linking this to omni-channel, being always in your pocket but also giving access to the right person to engage at the right time, transforming infrequent pushes to constant engagement.

Edward: Completely agree. Your first point is absolutely right. This is a journey. Insurers, banks, and financial institutions that get on that journey now and continue to iterate as users, buyers, renters, and occasionally makers of these tools and capabilities are the ones that will thrive in the future.

The hardest part, not just in my organization but any large organization, is starting the journey — even the low-hanging fruit around workforce efficiency and productivity such as board papers and meeting minutes. AI tools can take out hundreds of hours of manpower a month and redirect that manpower into more productive value activities. We started doing that, but it took us too long to do that. The point is to start small and keep building. Organizations that resist this are like King Canute standing in front of the tide trying to push it back — it won’t end well.

To your second point, this is really interesting — that “always on” advice. There are constraints and barriers: regulatory, risk appetite, which is linked. We don’t want to turn hundreds of millions of retail customers into active hedge fund traders acting on every market update. We’re in the long-term business but need to engage customers more frequently than before.

We now do a lot of push notifications. With tech and data convergence, we have that capability on our apps. Push opens amazing opportunities to engage dynamically and personally in ways SMS, email, or letters never could.

On the health side, we’re close to being “always on”. Investments in our health business include AI supplementary tools for diagnostics, triage through virtual consultation capabilities, working with partners to match outpatient and group medical clients to doctors for phone diagnosis instead of going to the doctor. We procure drugs and treatment centrally and dispatch them. Within four hours, customers have it at home.

We’ve learned from Uber, our virtual consultation model. We do about 1,000 virtual consultations a week. It’s an Uber model. All we’re doing is connecting demand with a pool of qualified professional supply on a time-match basis rather than queuing. Don’t go to a taxi rank and queue, don’t go to a doctor and queue. Then the fulfillment piece, post-diagnosis, is the Amazon model, which is: if you centralize procurement, you get massive economies of scale and very good price certainty. In medical business, the thing that kills you is cost — expense creep and margin dilution. That other thing is a great example of how our customers know, wherever they are, whatever they’re doing, and whatever time of the day, can consume their medical insurance and services from us. “Always on.” That’s really powerful.

We’re not there yet on the life insurance side. My challenge there is I’m not sure we want to be, because we may end up triggering — our actuaries will be terrified about dynamic lapse modeling — if we constantly bombard our customers with messages.

But I do think you’re right. In terms of acquisition and new clients, it gives us an opportunity to engage with a historically underserved section of society and the potential customer base of tomorrow in a way that maybe we wouldn’t have done without this.

I do think we have crossed the bridge now. In the past 20 years, we don’t like  to contact customers. We thought it’s risky as customers might complain, and then regulators might get upset. Now, actually, we can — and we do — contact our customers as frequently as technology and relevance allow us to.

Paul: If you look at the US life insurance market, I feel like every player has picked a strategy of where they play and where they do not play. We’ve seen players really doubling down on distribution, doubling down on more asset-light type products, or doubling down on being more of an asset management–led player. Being a product manufacturer in the US feels like a losing game many times. How do you see a similar dynamic potentially playing out in Asia for insurers?

Edward: Good question. When I was in the US recently for The Geneva Association, it was very interesting — the first time I’ve been there in a long time — to see the evolution of that market. To your point, the convergence of the asset side with the liability side, and the asset side effectively owning the liability side. My experience growing up in the UK is very different — the liability side on the asset side. So, it’s quite an interesting paradigm.

I think in Asia, you see some of that. I’d like to think we’re kind of at the forefront. We’ve got many examples where we’ve used our bank to originate assets, private credit, to give us risk-weighted yield pickup, which then backs liabilities that we can hold. Obviously, we were not consolidated from a capital perspective into the bank. Long-dated credit assets are very expensive for banks to hold. If you think about things like infrastructure, data, and climate transition financing. These are great assets for us — they’re long duration, very high quality, and have very strong cash flow predictability.

So, I think that is happening among some of us. Saying Asia as one homogenous market is hard, because Asia is a large market of very different markets. The dynamics even between Hong Kong and Singapore, or Hong Kong and Mainland China, are very different. What we would do on the asset side in Hong Kong is very different from what we can or could do in Mainland China. So, it’s very difficult to choose a lane. That’s your point: let’s choose a lane, but being in that lane across Asia is very tough. I think what insurers and financial institutions do now in Asia involves a participation question at a market level: which market do we want to be in, and which do we not want to be in? I don’t think in the US you say, “I’ll be in New York, but I won’t be in Pennsylvania.” Despite state regulation, you’re in the market. But in Asia, those are key decisions that have to be made. The lanes you play may be different market to market. The mix is very different. Some intermediary dynamics are very different.

India is a fascinating market for us. We’ve got great business there. But in India, if I look at product margins on an embedded value (EV) basis, these are mature market margins in an emerging market. So, we face big strategic questions around which parts of the value chain you’re going to play in. In China, when you’ve got 30-year government bonds yielding 1.8%, you think you should do distribution in China, but regulations cap distribution and brokerage commissions there as well. So within what is currently a low-yield market, which parts of the value chain can you preserve your returns frankly? Because in the long run, this is the world’s biggest market — bigger than all other Asian markets combined. You’re really in return preservation mode to benefit over the medium and long term.

Certainly, a long-winded question: we haven’t seen yet the Athena, Apollo, Global Atlantic model really takes off from a primary perspective in Asia. I’m not sure it will. I think there are regulatory and nationalistic dynamics that may prevent that because it would be largely US-led, and I’m not sure it’s the right time for that. What we have seen — and again, we’re a major player in this — is Bermuda. We’ve seen huge amounts of insurers, as all these markets move into risk-based capital (RBC) regimes, very incentivized to get lower-yielding, higher-cost, enforce portfolios off. Bermuda has been very effective, and we’ve got our business there. The market has been very effective at acquiring those portfolios and providing reinsurance risk transfer, whether it’s IFRS 17, whether it’s RBC. Reinsurance is continually a preferred and economically sensible solution to that. Some of that underlying risk is backed by the same private capital names you mentioned earlier. So, you’ll see more of that. I think you’ll see more risk transfer, more reinsurance into private markets indirectly. I don’t think we’ll see the shift directly at this stage.

Paul: Terrific. Shifting us to our final chapter, we’d love to — I think we’re nicely warmed up about a lot of these topics — we’d love to get your views on your CEO agenda. Looking at your customers and markets, even internally, what’s top of mind for you over the next three to five years?

Edward: Our strategy is very simple: wealth, health, and high net worth. Our wealth business is about integrating, to the highest level possible, our insurance franchise within an integrated insurance and investment wealth advisory capability from HSBC. We do that very well in some markets; we have improvements to make in others. Sometimes insurance is an augmentation to that wealth capability because we can provide distribution capacity beyond a bricks-and-mortar perimeter.

It’s health because medical prices constantly outstrip inflation. We have tremendous unreplicable competitive advantages because we are in payments; we can move cash around the system faster. We have a large corporate bank that allows us to have persistence gains with major clients. Those are the two key things.

High net worth is critical. We are a leading high net worth provider and hold a Guinness World Record for the largest individual life insurance policy ever written. My Singapore and Hong Kong businesses are competing to see who will break that record. I can’t share specifics about the person; otherwise, we’ll never write another policy again. The previous world record holder, according to Guinness, was issued in California about 10 years ago, by all guesses a gentleman called Elon Musk. I’m not sure we could afford to underwrite him anymore. He was way ahead of his time, looking at insurance as a way to leverage your estate.

High net worth is critical for us. We’re fortunate in our Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bermuda businesses to have those capabilities and that internationalization of wealth. Twenty years ago, you needed to plant your flag in every country to be in every country. Now, you don’t. You don’t have to build technology platforms, hire people, and have capital in every market because if you’re playing in the higher net worth space, this is onshore to offshore business anyway.

Those are the three strategies for us. I need to do the basics: continue to grow double-digit. If you look at our Q1 results, we’re growing our business CSM by 40% plus, at US$1 billion a quarter, and we need to continue to grow double-digit. We need to re-shift our participation because capital, technology allocations, and time are finite. You’ll have seen recent news — we’ve made moves in Europe, France, and the UK. That’s not because we don’t like those businesses; it’s because we need to be more focused on where our highest growth and returns are and be relentless in chasing those returns.

The third thing is future proofing. As a CEO, it comes down to leaving the business in better shape than you inherited it. That’s about balance sheet stability, market share, earnings, and mostly people. Future-proofing our business with leadership capability, talent, pipelines, and culture. Culture — my boss always says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Everyone has the same strategy but has a culture and leadership where people make decisions, hold themselves accountable, make collective decisions but act individually with bravery and efficiency — that’s when we outperform. So, it’s growth, participation and allocation decisions, and people and culture.

Paul: I have an interesting anecdote about Elon Musk and insurance. When Tesla started Tesla Insurance, in one investor presentation, Elon was asked about insurance. He said, “We love insurance, great business to be in,” obviously on the P&C side. He said, “We love actuaries. They do math, they’re great, and they do it on very interesting things. At Tesla, we’re looking to hire revolutionary actuaries.” Interestingly, I know the person who was the first hire as the revolutionary actuary. Her title is “Revolutionary Actuary,” actually, which was overridden by Elon Musk. She’s now a Senior Revolutionary Actuary.

Edward: You don’t want to turn up at our group risk management forum with that title for sure.

Paul: There’s an interesting point there. You’re talking about culture and all these things. In a world where insurance institutional knowledge, experience, and risk management are important, being able to adapt and be flexible is also important. That idea of revolutionary talent — having that expertise but also being open to everything happening around you — is an interesting balance we need to keep in our industry.

Edward: I agree. We talked before about the long-term risks of relevancy for our industry. That comes down to people. Are we building human capital? Are we attracting the next generation of human capital into our industry directly or adjacently? When I look to hire people, it’s IQ and EQ. Historically, we hired people with the highest IQ — the best underwriters, investment managers, intermediaries. Now it’s much more about EQ, being lateral, really getting to the bottom of trends, consumer behavior, supply chain behavior, and everything else. So, we do need to start looking at the people we hire and being more diverse and inclusive in a macro way.

Paul: We’re coming up on time. Before we wrap, one final question for you, based on everything we discussed. Any few final words of wisdom for our audience?

Edward: I’ve never been accused of being wise. I have also never been accused of just providing a few words. So that’s quite a challenge for me.

I think for those listeners who are not as close as perhaps we are to Asia right now, this is such an exciting part of the world. It’s too easy to just say this is where growth is because it’s so much more complex and multifaceted than this. But I do see Asia really driving the global life and health agenda for some time to come. Asia needs to step up to the market globally and better represent itself within this industry. Also, globally, I think we need to spend more time spotlighting and profiling Asia on that basis.

Paul: Ed, thank you so much for your time.

Edward: Thank you. Pleasure.

Paul: Thank you very much for this. That was Edward Moncreiffe, who is the Group CEO for HSBC Life. I’m Paul Ricard. Thanks for listening and I’ll catch you next time.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Edward Moncreiffe serves as the CEO of HSBC’s global insurance operations spanning Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Since joining HSBC Group in 2005, Ed has held numerous senior leadership roles across various sectors, including broking, underwriting, reinsurance, life, and non-life insurance lines, and has contributed to Group Strategy. After relocating to Hong Kong in 2016, he served as CEO of HSBC Insurance (Asia) Limited and HSBC Life (International) Limited, managing HSBC’s insurance businesses in Hong Kong and Macao.

Outside of HSBC, Ed serves as the chairman at the Hong Kong Federation of Insurers (HKFI) and is a member of the General Committee of the Insurance Complaints Bureau (ICB). He also participates in the Economic Policy Committee and the Financial and Treasury Services Committee of The Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce. Additionally, Ed chairs the board of Governors of Matilda International Hospital and the City Mental Health Alliance HK, and serves on the board of the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) Principles of Sustainable Insurance (PSI).

Ed earned a bachelor of arts from the University of Durham, UK, and a master of business administration from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is also a chartered insurer, accredited by the Chartered Insurance Institute.

Oliver Wyman Partner and Head of Asia Pacific Insurance and Asset Management, Paul Ricard is based in Singapore. Paul works closely with businesses to reinvent their strategies, products, and services — and to fuel top-line growth opportunities.

He works with clients across Asia Pacific, as well as the Americas and Europe. He regularly partners with firms to reinvent their business strategy, rethink their priorities, and to modernize their technology while accounting for rapidly changing customer needs. He understands his clients’ realities and thrives on helping them innovate and strengthen relationships with their customers while factoring existing challenges.

Asia’s unprecedented wave of wealth creation and transfer is reshaping the future of the global insurance industry. In this episode of Reinventing Insurance, Edward Moncreiffe, CEO Insurance at HSBC Group, joins our host Paul Ricard to explore emerging market opportunities and the biggest macroeconomic trends redefining the region’s sector. Based in Hong Kong, Edward draws on nearly two decades of experience working across multiple continents. He articulates a clear vision of the insurance industry’s future in Asia, marked by significant demographic shifts, a rich cultural landscape, and the imperative for digital transformation.

Edward’s insights provide valuable guidance for insurance and financial services leaders to navigate market complexities while remaining focused on customer needs and sustainable growth. He sheds light on the convergence of wealth management and insurance solutions and where this is leading to more comprehensive insurance, investment, and health insurance offerings, as well as fueling deeper engagement with customers.

In this episode, Edward and Paul also share perspectives on:

• Leveraging generative artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation for customer engagement and service models.
• Significant wealth transfer opportunities for insurers to serve legacy planning needs and the changing demographic shifts as older generations retire.
• Sustainable growth opportunities for insurance carriers by reshaping their technology, distribution strategies, and strengthening relationships with distribution partners.
• The lasting resilience and balance of face-to-face distribution alongside digital servicing.
• Building a strong organizational culture focused on talent development and employee empowerment which leads to improved performance and innovation.
• Vibrant and emerging opportunities in Hong Kong as it becomes a major global insurance powerhouse amid geopolitical and economic shifts.

This episode is part of our Reinventing Insurance series that explores best practices for taking a CustomerFirst approach to innovation within insurance. Throughout this series, host Paul Ricard discusses lessons, challenges, and new ways of working with guests who will share their first-hand experiences.

Subscribe for more on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Mega trends shaping the future of the insurance industry

Paul Ricard: Welcome to Reinventing Insurance. Today, I’m pleased to welcome Edward Moncreiffe, who is the Group CEO of HSBC Life. Welcome, Ed.

Edward Moncreiffe: Thank you for having me, Paul.

Paul: Ed, I have to tell you, I feel like I’m braving the weather today to be with you. We’re in Hong Kong, and it’s typhoon season. I think we’re somewhere between an amber and a red storm right now.

Edward: It’s black rain outside, which is why we look as we do, right?

Paul: Yeah, so hopefully we’re obviously safe here. We’ll see how the rest of the day turns out. Without further ado, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey in the insurance industry, Ed?

Edward: Sure. First of all, thank you for having me. It’s my first podcast, so go easy on me. I started 19 years ago as an insurance broker at a company called HSBC Insurance Brokers and Lloyd’s of London, the old HSBC Gibbs business, which HSBC had purchased, I think, in the late 70s, before it even bought Midland Bank, to get a foothold in the London market. I had tried and failed to be a journalist, which was my dream when I was younger.

Paul: There must be a dream now for you to be on a podcast.

Edward: You would have thought these things would have existed 19 years ago; maybe careers would have panned out very differently. But I realized I wasn’t very good at writing, and there really wasn’t much money in it for a 22-year-old junior sports reporter at the Daily Telegraph.

So, the job I managed to land was on the graduate scheme of an insurance broker. I spent my first couple of years in Lloyd’s of London placing various risks — mainly marine, cargo, energy, aviation — and doing the ferrying jobs that junior brokers would do, shuttling to and from Leadenhall Market for liquid and refreshments. After that, I was taken by the group, by the HSBC Group, to head office to work in strategy and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) for a while. I spent some time in Ireland running our reinsurance company during the crisis and exiting some of the liabilities and risks we had accumulated there. I spent some time in Brazil running our pensions business, which was a fascinating time. Then I moved to Hong Kong. I left Copacabana Beach on New Year’s Day with my wife in January 2016, and 36 hours later, we turned up in Hong Kong. I ran our insurance company here — the life and health company — for seven and a half years. It was a fabulous time, and we created a very strong market-leading franchise. Then, in the first quarter of last year, I became the global CEO for our insurance franchise.

It’s been a really interesting journey across multiple jurisdictions and a prolonged shift from non-life to life, from London to Hong Kong. I’ve learned a little over the years but have been privileged to learn from many very smart people around the world. Hopefully, maybe one day someone will say the same about me. Still got a long way to go.

Paul: Congrats on the latest role opportunity. I was going to say you’ve seen one company, one group, but many different facets of the insurance industry in the process. Tell us a little about your current role and about HSBC Life as well. What’s the scope? What does it cover? What’s a day in your life as the Group CEO for HSBC Life?

Edward: Sure. I’ll steal a memorable TripAdvisor review of the Victoria and Albert Museum café in London.

Paul: I thought you were going to say something about HSBC Life.

Edward: They’ve said this is one of the greatest cafés in the world with a nice museum attached to it. That’s how I see my role. Obviously, we’re part of one of the world’s largest financial organizations — a US$3 trillion balance sheet across around 60-odd markets around the world — a real financial behemoth. I’m responsible for all of our insurance operations, which are predominantly in Asia, where we are leading. We are the number one life and health insurer in Hong Kong. We own 100% our businesses in Macau, Mainland China, and Singapore. We have a very large joint venture in India. We also have businesses in Bermuda, Mexico, and across Europe, and where we don’t underwrite or manufacture, we are obviously a distributor as a bank, as a licensed intermediary. I have accountability for that. The HSBC Life business has about US$120 billion of assets. It’s a big business. If you look at our Q1 results for the group, you can see we’re generating US$1 billion of new business contractual service margin (CSM) — that’s deferred International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) profits from new business. It’s growing very fast. We’re a key growth engine for the group, capitalizing particularly in this part of the world on the wealth creation, wealth transfer, and wealth growth happening in these economies and societies.

Paul: Let’s start talking about the macro trends. I’d be very keen to hear from your standpoint, obviously maybe focusing on Asia. What are some of the biggest macro trends you’ve seen reshaping the insurance industry landscape from a demand standpoint in the last few years? Obviously, a lot has been happening with China — the rebalance between China and the rest of the region. I’d love to get your views on that. What else has been really top of mind and the biggest influences from your standpoint?

Edward: Sure. I think “macro trend” is the right way to frame this. We’re, as an industry, not a reactionary industry. When we behave that way, we get into trouble. We are a long-term anticipatory industry, and it is the macro trend that drives our agenda.

I’m a big believer in demographic destiny, particularly for life and health. If you look at the US market as an example, there’s massive growth coming from retirement annuities. You don’t need a crystal ball — just a basic grasp of demographics to figure out that the baby boomer generation would be coming to the end of their accumulation phase and going into decumulation.

We see similar, not the same but similar, dynamics in Asia. What’s really interesting, particularly in places like China, is the first-generation wealth creators — literally the first families, entrepreneurs, business owners, patriarchs, and matriarchs who have created significant wealth — reaching an age where wealth transfer and legacy have come to the forefront. You have to be careful about stereotyping and overgeneralizing, but one thing I’ve seen very differently in the East and the West is the concept of legacy. It’s all-encompassing, particularly in certain Asian cultures. It’s not just about accumulating or consuming all of my wealth until it’s gone; it’s really about transferring wealth. We’re seeing massive pools of wealth looking to be transferred from the first generation to the second and sometimes even third generation in Asia. This is an amazing tailwind for us as an insurance industry. The fundamental purpose of our contracts is to transfer wealth between an insured and a beneficiary, and our products and solutions provide many advantages as to why that’s a good choice today.

First, I’d say for the aging population in Asia, particularly the aging of first-generation wealth creators, it’s all about this tidal wave of wealth creation and wealth transfer.

The second thing, more recent and seen really in the last five to 10 years rather than the past 20 to 30 years, is the internationalization of wealth and financial planning, and the role of life insurance within that. We sit here in Hong Kong, an international financial center. Last year, our Hong Kong business wrote insurance contracts on people from 50 different countries of residences. Our Singapore business is very similar. The ability now for wealth to flow across markets and for estate and legacy planning to be carried out across markets is really interesting.

If we look at the three major flows particularly of interest to me and my business, it is the Greater China flow, which largely but not exclusively comes to Hong Kong; the ASEAN flow, with huge wealth accumulated in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, largely but not exclusively going to Singapore; and then the Middle East and the NRI — the non-resident Indian population — which goes to Bermuda and in some parts of Singapore and Hong Kong as well. It is demographics around aging, wealth transfer, and internationalization of wealth.

Paul: I totally hear you. The aging generation is bringing it back to the scale and growth of that need. You talked about internationalization. One thing I’m curious about is how you see the needs having evolved. You talked a lot about first-generation wealth. How would you address the needs of the person from 10 or 20 years ago versus now? How has it evolved? Is it more complex? Does it require much more tailored propositions for very different personas?

Edward: Very good question. Maybe I’d answer it in two ways — give a bit of a cop-out answer. The answer is kind of yes and no.

On the intermediary and advice side, absolutely. There is now a very clear differentiation between advisory and distribution. People have been predicting the decline of tied agencies in Asia forever, and it hasn’t happened. I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon because there are very deep-rooted cultural and community factors that will sustain that. But what we’ve seen is the emergence of a level of tailorization. One of your businesses is a good partner of ours; Mercer PCS is an example of that. You do need a specific level of intellectual capital and ability to manage and advise on wealth and asset allocation and everything that goes with that. As part of a bank, that also gives us a competitive advantage because people typically look to us for things like asset allocation. We’ve been advertising our internationality for 30 years. This is an inherent source of strength.

On the product side, I don’t think I’ve seen massive shifts in product. Yes, we’ve seen the emergence of more index-linked products, more exotic linked solutions with various caps and collars, derivatives, and everything else, but it’s nothing that hasn’t existed in the West for a number of years. As insurers, we tend to — apologies to my product colleagues — sometimes overplay our product innovation. Frankly, within insurance, innovation may not always be the best thing.

What I’d say is the key trend I’ve seen in the past five to six years is a flight to quality, a flight to risk aversion, because this has been an enormously turbulent time over the past 10 years across the world, particularly in Asia. The way COVID landed, and some of the trade and geopolitical challenges that have manifested over the past eight to 12 years, have reinforced this. What you haven’t seen in most parts of Asia, which you did see in the West, particularly in the US, was massive public market valuation growth. The S&P is trending at like two times what it was 10 years ago. I look at the Hang Seng Index; it’s still down on where it was in 2019. If you look at property prices across Greater China and most of Asia, again. Many consumers and savers in Asia are wrestling with very different dynamics than people in the West. Insurance continues to over-index as a safe haven, something which will not lose you money, something which can offset negative spreads or negative equity you’re getting elsewhere in your wealth portfolio.

I have seen products start to take significantly different asset allocations. The way insurers, perhaps somewhat similar to the US, have started to include much larger allocations to private markets in how they manage their balance sheets, their general account products, and how they are then able to offer customers more illiquid, long-term, better-yielding options. That’s a very important trend in Asia. In the absence of a massive re-rating of stock markets or properties, which are the other two alternative wealth accumulation vehicles in Asia, you have to be pretty bullish that the growth of insurance as a preferred financial product will continue for some time.

Paul: That makes a lot of sense. You use the word wealth a lot. I always joke that if you ask five different experts in wealth management for the definition of wealth management, they may give you different answers. One question for you: I heard you mentioned aging and almost talked about a loose correlation between an aging population and increasingly wealthy pools of populations in need of insurance. If you move beyond that, thinking about the mass market or mass affluence, the younger generations, what trends are you seeing there? How do you see the insurance needs there?

Edward: To my point around losing bets against agency and tied distribution, there’s a big contrast, in my view, between the West and the East on this. In many parts of the West, insurance has become either a luxury good — you need to be a certain wealth to benefit from the fiscal or scale advantages it brings — or it’s mandatory. It’s like tax. You just have to do it, whether it’s a pension or motor insurance. That’s why the old jokes about dinner parties in London where you never want to say you work in insurance because people see it as either a luxury good or a tax. Both have social connotations.

But in Asia, if I may be so bold, insurance is still a very aspirational, socially respected, and socially essential means of wealth accumulation. I can’t think of a single city or country in this part of the world where you don’t have a sizable part of the community who works for or with the insurance industry. Hong Kong is a great example. People have this image of Hong Kong as owners of skyscrapers and capital markets, but 3.5% of the population sells insurance — about 120,000 licensed intermediaries in this city. That is not uncommon in other cities, both developed and developing, in Asia.

Insurance intermediation in Asia and in urban Asia has become a way to serve the wealth accumulation needs of the younger population, the more mass population. On that basis, insurance is deeply rooted in society. Everyone has a family member or friend who works in insurance, sells insurance, or is an agent at XYZ or broker ABC. It is a very socially accepted and preferred vehicle, trusted on that basis because it has human and familial instincts.

The second point I mentioned earlier is important: Alternative mechanisms for wealth accumulation have failed to preserve wealth. Every market in Asia has been through numerous stock market crashes, economic volatility, and property booms and busts. Insurance is a safe haven, the calm in the storm. In high-savings cultures like Asia, that will continue. Frankly, the only thing the insurance industry has to fear, and the one thing we should be so focused on, is making sure we don’t trip ourselves up, which is largely going to be conduct, maybe solvency, asset-liability matching, and other things. But the biggest risk to our own inexorable growth in this part of the world is ourselves.

Paul: By the way, speaking of Hong Kong, it’s obviously a major global insurance hub, as you were talking about, with a very special role. There’s obviously been a lot happening. I would be curious to hear your view on how Hong Kong is evolving and where you see things going in the coming years in the region and globally when it comes to the insurance industry.

Edward: I’m very pro-Hong Kong. It’s been my home for nearly a decade. My kids were born here. I used to chair the Insurance Federation here. Hong Kong’s life market, frankly, is a bit of a unicorn. I say that because I think it’s the most penetrated market on earth. It’s the highest density insurance market on earth, but it’s also one of the fastest growing markets on earth. It’s not rocket science. It’s because you have tens and tens, arguably 100-plus million of emerging affluent and all the way up to ultra-high-net-worth Mainland Chinese. The Hong Kong life insurance industry, I think, has developed over time very successfully to go beyond its natural borders. I don’t just mean geographic — obviously, for regulatory and legal reasons — but in terms of its products, which have become genuine wealth management products.

If you had looked at the market 30 years ago, this was a market selling term life and mortgage assurance and everything else. But if you look at what the market sells now, these are wealth accumulation, wealth decumulation, wealth transfer, long-term care — every single need, whether for retirement, education, legacy, or protection, can now be met pretty adequately  and successfully by the life insurance industry in Hong Kong.

If I look at the Greater Bay Area, for example, there are 83 million people. It’s more than the population of the UK. And it’s increasingly a common market. There’s freedom of movement of people, goods, and services. The volumes that Hong Kong can still serve as an international financial capital from the Greater Bay Area, from Mainland China, from Asia — because it’s not just China, although China is the lion’s share — make this market very attractive now. It can’t get complacent.

When I used to run the Federation, we spent a lot of time with government and regulators saying Hong Kong has many natural competitive advantages: the rule of law and contract law that’s been here for many years, which is the basis of any insurance industry; the English language, the language of business; and the geographical proximity, being the bridge between China and the world. All three of those things can weaken over time or be shocked by competitive markets and jurisdictions. But as long as Hong Kong continues to place emphasis on its stability — its political and legal stability and reliability — it is where global capital comes to do business. As long as it preserves that international business strength and takes advantage of that bridge into and out of China, I think Hong Kong is going to be very successful.

It is now very much a life and health market. Property and casualty (P&C) would be the flip side, frankly. Despite having competitive advantages around large, massive trading ports and significant freight and cargo volumes, Hong Kong never managed to evolve its ancillary insurance industry — P&C, marine, aviation, and everything else — in a way it could have. Now it’s very difficult because once an ecosystem is created, whether that be Lloyd’s of London, Bermuda, or Singapore for this line of business, it’s very difficult for other markets to catch up.

So, with Hong Kong, it is a lopsided market. My personal view — and I’m not going to make myself popular with everyone — is that it will continue to be more and more lopsided over time and will be a life, investment, and health market.

Paul: Very interesting. Shifting gears a little, we started to get into this. We were talking about the evolution of industry and the ecosystem itself. I’d love for you to elaborate on what we were starting to discuss earlier in terms of how you see the overall insurance ecosystem evolving. In particular, how carriers are evolving their value proposition, distribution strategies, and relationships with distribution partners. You hinted that it varies depending on the part of the market you’re after. We’d love to get some of your views on that.

Edward: Lots of views. I think distribution has not evolved in Asia to the extent that people thought it would. I’m not just talking about tied channels, but generally. It hasn’t been shocking. Many said digital would take over. It hasn’t. Culturally and from a complexity perspective, this is still an advised, face-to-face driven industry.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for digital to play. I’m a big believer in the omni-channel model. I always say we have an insurance company in your pocket because with our mobile banking apps, our two million policyholders in Asia can do anything they want with their insurance with their mobile phone. Are they going to apply for universal life policies on their mobile banking app? It seems unlikely. Digital has become much more of a servicing and engagement capability rather than a sales or distribution capability.

We haven’t seen much integration or value chain integration between distribution and manufacturing — some of it for regulatory reasons, some because capital has, as in parts of the West, very clearly bifurcated between distribution and manufacturing.

Our view is that our ability to provide a one-stop shop — maybe not be the right word — but our ability to own the value chain where we can and choose to give us massive and unreplicable competitive advantages versus pure-play peers who play in particular segments.

I’ll give you a recent example. We launched a new index universal life product in Hong Kong this week. Great products: cap and collar, S&P, Hang Seng Index, gold indexes. What’s interesting is every part of the value chain is managed by HSBC, and it’s written on HSBC Life paper. The indexes are provided by HSBC Asset Management, custody by HSBC Security Services, derivatives by HSBC Global Markets, and distribution through HSBC Private Bank. Our ability to own the value chain, price the value chain, and between different sectors subsidize it rather than compete, gives us the opportunity to reflect that in higher returns on capital for shareholders or better pricing for customers. That’s really exciting. There’ll be more to come on how we can configure genuinely unreplicable solutions. The big question then becomes: who do you pass that on to — shareholders, customers, intermediaries, or all?

Paul: You obviously have the ability to own the value chain where you choose. There seem to be more examples of this coming up. What do you think is the hardest part for some of your competitors to replicate? If someone were to assemble the right sum of parts with the right partnerships, what do you think is the hardest part for them to replicate that would be unique to your group?

Edward: Good question. I’m going to try to answer with a terrible metaphor. I have a 6-year-old son obsessed with Lego, and my house is covered in Lego. Anyone can build Lego if you have all the pieces and instructions. But if you don’t have the instructions and all the pieces, it’s a lot harder.

I think the challenge is procuring the various components of the value chain with a commensurate level of risk appetite. When every player in the value chain has their own minimum hurdles, you get into a value capture conversation rather than value creation. That’s the hardest part. It’s not that it can’t be done; there are many examples of great partnerships, including one of your sister companies. We have great partnerships with third parties, which will be critical to our future, but not all of them work. You’re inherently geared towards supply-demand dynamics and negotiations.

Even if you land at that sweet spot where everyone wins, the time to get to the market is significantly longer, and opportunity costs are higher. Using Hong Kong as an example, there’s a reason no one else has been able, since regulation changes, to release a genuine universal life legacy protection plan at our speed — we have all the pieces of the Lego box and the instruction manual. That doesn’t mean we always get it right, and sometimes we end up building the wrong things. But time to market and the ability to work towards a common, consistent return on capital or internal rate of return (IRR) or risk-weighted return rather than trading off constituent parts is key.

Paul: Going back to the digital front, I have to throw in AI at some point. You said earlier we haven’t seen a massive shock to distribution in the insurance industry in the East. You also mentioned that digital is less about going hard at digital as a channel on its own but more about servicing. If I fast forward five years, how do you see that evolving? We talked about omni-channel. How do you see the role of digital evolving and the role of an agent or a relationship manager?

Edward: Timely question. With the insanely fast developments in AI and large language models over the past couple of years, this is a tipping point. I do think things may change quickly.

We’ve been using AI for years; its core to our pricing. We run incredibly complex data-driven models and algorithms every day on the liability side. We are not so much on distribution — now we are, because we have many copilot-type tools. How do we make our agents in Singapore, bankers in Hong Kong, brokers in China more productive? There are many off-the-shelf tools we can use so that, before you meet with Paul, while on the train or in the car, you can have a more informed meeting because you can scrape huge amounts of detail about Paul, markets, and the world to have a better, more productive client meeting.

We see AI as a copilot for our supply chain, distributors, and intermediaries. What may change is it becoming a copilot for buyers, consumers, and customers. If customers around the world and customers in Asia, now can use Google, Gemini, ChatGPT, or others to help them choose the right hotel when they go on holiday in Thailand, or to help them book the right restaurant that they’re looking for in a particular city, why wouldn’t they use these tools to plan for the future, buy insurance, select retirement funds, or choose medical insurance partners? Why wouldn’t they? We need to be aware that our customers may change, and it may happen overnight. As we’ve seen in other industries, it may go overnight, and we need to be ready for that.

Paul: I’ll share a couple of hypotheses with you that I’d love your take on.

My first hypothesis is that people who manage to stay ahead are those who are flexible and nimble enough to adapt to new tools and technologies, constantly curious and integrating them into their workflow. It’s not once and done; we’re moving from binary to quantum shifts.

The other point, linked to your point about ChatGPT becoming an insurance adviser, is that in insurance, we’re still at the “point in time” engagement, and there’s engaging at the right moments. But is there a way — whether wealth management or financial wellness — to be truly “always on”, providing the right guidance and perspectives? Linking this to omni-channel, being always in your pocket but also giving access to the right person to engage at the right time, transforming infrequent pushes to constant engagement.

Edward: Completely agree. Your first point is absolutely right. This is a journey. Insurers, banks, and financial institutions that get on that journey now and continue to iterate as users, buyers, renters, and occasionally makers of these tools and capabilities are the ones that will thrive in the future.

The hardest part, not just in my organization but any large organization, is starting the journey — even the low-hanging fruit around workforce efficiency and productivity such as board papers and meeting minutes. AI tools can take out hundreds of hours of manpower a month and redirect that manpower into more productive value activities. We started doing that, but it took us too long to do that. The point is to start small and keep building. Organizations that resist this are like King Canute standing in front of the tide trying to push it back — it won’t end well.

To your second point, this is really interesting — that “always on” advice. There are constraints and barriers: regulatory, risk appetite, which is linked. We don’t want to turn hundreds of millions of retail customers into active hedge fund traders acting on every market update. We’re in the long-term business but need to engage customers more frequently than before.

We now do a lot of push notifications. With tech and data convergence, we have that capability on our apps. Push opens amazing opportunities to engage dynamically and personally in ways SMS, email, or letters never could.

On the health side, we’re close to being “always on”. Investments in our health business include AI supplementary tools for diagnostics, triage through virtual consultation capabilities, working with partners to match outpatient and group medical clients to doctors for phone diagnosis instead of going to the doctor. We procure drugs and treatment centrally and dispatch them. Within four hours, customers have it at home.

We’ve learned from Uber, our virtual consultation model. We do about 1,000 virtual consultations a week. It’s an Uber model. All we’re doing is connecting demand with a pool of qualified professional supply on a time-match basis rather than queuing. Don’t go to a taxi rank and queue, don’t go to a doctor and queue. Then the fulfillment piece, post-diagnosis, is the Amazon model, which is: if you centralize procurement, you get massive economies of scale and very good price certainty. In medical business, the thing that kills you is cost — expense creep and margin dilution. That other thing is a great example of how our customers know, wherever they are, whatever they’re doing, and whatever time of the day, can consume their medical insurance and services from us. “Always on.” That’s really powerful.

We’re not there yet on the life insurance side. My challenge there is I’m not sure we want to be, because we may end up triggering — our actuaries will be terrified about dynamic lapse modeling — if we constantly bombard our customers with messages.

But I do think you’re right. In terms of acquisition and new clients, it gives us an opportunity to engage with a historically underserved section of society and the potential customer base of tomorrow in a way that maybe we wouldn’t have done without this.

I do think we have crossed the bridge now. In the past 20 years, we don’t like  to contact customers. We thought it’s risky as customers might complain, and then regulators might get upset. Now, actually, we can — and we do — contact our customers as frequently as technology and relevance allow us to.

Paul: If you look at the US life insurance market, I feel like every player has picked a strategy of where they play and where they do not play. We’ve seen players really doubling down on distribution, doubling down on more asset-light type products, or doubling down on being more of an asset management–led player. Being a product manufacturer in the US feels like a losing game many times. How do you see a similar dynamic potentially playing out in Asia for insurers?

Edward: Good question. When I was in the US recently for The Geneva Association, it was very interesting — the first time I’ve been there in a long time — to see the evolution of that market. To your point, the convergence of the asset side with the liability side, and the asset side effectively owning the liability side. My experience growing up in the UK is very different — the liability side on the asset side. So, it’s quite an interesting paradigm.

I think in Asia, you see some of that. I’d like to think we’re kind of at the forefront. We’ve got many examples where we’ve used our bank to originate assets, private credit, to give us risk-weighted yield pickup, which then backs liabilities that we can hold. Obviously, we were not consolidated from a capital perspective into the bank. Long-dated credit assets are very expensive for banks to hold. If you think about things like infrastructure, data, and climate transition financing. These are great assets for us — they’re long duration, very high quality, and have very strong cash flow predictability.

So, I think that is happening among some of us. Saying Asia as one homogenous market is hard, because Asia is a large market of very different markets. The dynamics even between Hong Kong and Singapore, or Hong Kong and Mainland China, are very different. What we would do on the asset side in Hong Kong is very different from what we can or could do in Mainland China. So, it’s very difficult to choose a lane. That’s your point: let’s choose a lane, but being in that lane across Asia is very tough. I think what insurers and financial institutions do now in Asia involves a participation question at a market level: which market do we want to be in, and which do we not want to be in? I don’t think in the US you say, “I’ll be in New York, but I won’t be in Pennsylvania.” Despite state regulation, you’re in the market. But in Asia, those are key decisions that have to be made. The lanes you play may be different market to market. The mix is very different. Some intermediary dynamics are very different.

India is a fascinating market for us. We’ve got great business there. But in India, if I look at product margins on an embedded value (EV) basis, these are mature market margins in an emerging market. So, we face big strategic questions around which parts of the value chain you’re going to play in. In China, when you’ve got 30-year government bonds yielding 1.8%, you think you should do distribution in China, but regulations cap distribution and brokerage commissions there as well. So within what is currently a low-yield market, which parts of the value chain can you preserve your returns frankly? Because in the long run, this is the world’s biggest market — bigger than all other Asian markets combined. You’re really in return preservation mode to benefit over the medium and long term.

Certainly, a long-winded question: we haven’t seen yet the Athena, Apollo, Global Atlantic model really takes off from a primary perspective in Asia. I’m not sure it will. I think there are regulatory and nationalistic dynamics that may prevent that because it would be largely US-led, and I’m not sure it’s the right time for that. What we have seen — and again, we’re a major player in this — is Bermuda. We’ve seen huge amounts of insurers, as all these markets move into risk-based capital (RBC) regimes, very incentivized to get lower-yielding, higher-cost, enforce portfolios off. Bermuda has been very effective, and we’ve got our business there. The market has been very effective at acquiring those portfolios and providing reinsurance risk transfer, whether it’s IFRS 17, whether it’s RBC. Reinsurance is continually a preferred and economically sensible solution to that. Some of that underlying risk is backed by the same private capital names you mentioned earlier. So, you’ll see more of that. I think you’ll see more risk transfer, more reinsurance into private markets indirectly. I don’t think we’ll see the shift directly at this stage.

Paul: Terrific. Shifting us to our final chapter, we’d love to — I think we’re nicely warmed up about a lot of these topics — we’d love to get your views on your CEO agenda. Looking at your customers and markets, even internally, what’s top of mind for you over the next three to five years?

Edward: Our strategy is very simple: wealth, health, and high net worth. Our wealth business is about integrating, to the highest level possible, our insurance franchise within an integrated insurance and investment wealth advisory capability from HSBC. We do that very well in some markets; we have improvements to make in others. Sometimes insurance is an augmentation to that wealth capability because we can provide distribution capacity beyond a bricks-and-mortar perimeter.

It’s health because medical prices constantly outstrip inflation. We have tremendous unreplicable competitive advantages because we are in payments; we can move cash around the system faster. We have a large corporate bank that allows us to have persistence gains with major clients. Those are the two key things.

High net worth is critical. We are a leading high net worth provider and hold a Guinness World Record for the largest individual life insurance policy ever written. My Singapore and Hong Kong businesses are competing to see who will break that record. I can’t share specifics about the person; otherwise, we’ll never write another policy again. The previous world record holder, according to Guinness, was issued in California about 10 years ago, by all guesses a gentleman called Elon Musk. I’m not sure we could afford to underwrite him anymore. He was way ahead of his time, looking at insurance as a way to leverage your estate.

High net worth is critical for us. We’re fortunate in our Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bermuda businesses to have those capabilities and that internationalization of wealth. Twenty years ago, you needed to plant your flag in every country to be in every country. Now, you don’t. You don’t have to build technology platforms, hire people, and have capital in every market because if you’re playing in the higher net worth space, this is onshore to offshore business anyway.

Those are the three strategies for us. I need to do the basics: continue to grow double-digit. If you look at our Q1 results, we’re growing our business CSM by 40% plus, at US$1 billion a quarter, and we need to continue to grow double-digit. We need to re-shift our participation because capital, technology allocations, and time are finite. You’ll have seen recent news — we’ve made moves in Europe, France, and the UK. That’s not because we don’t like those businesses; it’s because we need to be more focused on where our highest growth and returns are and be relentless in chasing those returns.

The third thing is future proofing. As a CEO, it comes down to leaving the business in better shape than you inherited it. That’s about balance sheet stability, market share, earnings, and mostly people. Future-proofing our business with leadership capability, talent, pipelines, and culture. Culture — my boss always says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Everyone has the same strategy but has a culture and leadership where people make decisions, hold themselves accountable, make collective decisions but act individually with bravery and efficiency — that’s when we outperform. So, it’s growth, participation and allocation decisions, and people and culture.

Paul: I have an interesting anecdote about Elon Musk and insurance. When Tesla started Tesla Insurance, in one investor presentation, Elon was asked about insurance. He said, “We love insurance, great business to be in,” obviously on the P&C side. He said, “We love actuaries. They do math, they’re great, and they do it on very interesting things. At Tesla, we’re looking to hire revolutionary actuaries.” Interestingly, I know the person who was the first hire as the revolutionary actuary. Her title is “Revolutionary Actuary,” actually, which was overridden by Elon Musk. She’s now a Senior Revolutionary Actuary.

Edward: You don’t want to turn up at our group risk management forum with that title for sure.

Paul: There’s an interesting point there. You’re talking about culture and all these things. In a world where insurance institutional knowledge, experience, and risk management are important, being able to adapt and be flexible is also important. That idea of revolutionary talent — having that expertise but also being open to everything happening around you — is an interesting balance we need to keep in our industry.

Edward: I agree. We talked before about the long-term risks of relevancy for our industry. That comes down to people. Are we building human capital? Are we attracting the next generation of human capital into our industry directly or adjacently? When I look to hire people, it’s IQ and EQ. Historically, we hired people with the highest IQ — the best underwriters, investment managers, intermediaries. Now it’s much more about EQ, being lateral, really getting to the bottom of trends, consumer behavior, supply chain behavior, and everything else. So, we do need to start looking at the people we hire and being more diverse and inclusive in a macro way.

Paul: We’re coming up on time. Before we wrap, one final question for you, based on everything we discussed. Any few final words of wisdom for our audience?

Edward: I’ve never been accused of being wise. I have also never been accused of just providing a few words. So that’s quite a challenge for me.

I think for those listeners who are not as close as perhaps we are to Asia right now, this is such an exciting part of the world. It’s too easy to just say this is where growth is because it’s so much more complex and multifaceted than this. But I do see Asia really driving the global life and health agenda for some time to come. Asia needs to step up to the market globally and better represent itself within this industry. Also, globally, I think we need to spend more time spotlighting and profiling Asia on that basis.

Paul: Ed, thank you so much for your time.

Edward: Thank you. Pleasure.

Paul: Thank you very much for this. That was Edward Moncreiffe, who is the Group CEO for HSBC Life. I’m Paul Ricard. Thanks for listening and I’ll catch you next time.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Edward Moncreiffe serves as the CEO of HSBC’s global insurance operations spanning Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Since joining HSBC Group in 2005, Ed has held numerous senior leadership roles across various sectors, including broking, underwriting, reinsurance, life, and non-life insurance lines, and has contributed to Group Strategy. After relocating to Hong Kong in 2016, he served as CEO of HSBC Insurance (Asia) Limited and HSBC Life (International) Limited, managing HSBC’s insurance businesses in Hong Kong and Macao.

Outside of HSBC, Ed serves as the chairman at the Hong Kong Federation of Insurers (HKFI) and is a member of the General Committee of the Insurance Complaints Bureau (ICB). He also participates in the Economic Policy Committee and the Financial and Treasury Services Committee of The Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce. Additionally, Ed chairs the board of Governors of Matilda International Hospital and the City Mental Health Alliance HK, and serves on the board of the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) Principles of Sustainable Insurance (PSI).

Ed earned a bachelor of arts from the University of Durham, UK, and a master of business administration from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is also a chartered insurer, accredited by the Chartered Insurance Institute.

Oliver Wyman Partner and Head of Asia Pacific Insurance and Asset Management, Paul Ricard is based in Singapore. Paul works closely with businesses to reinvent their strategies, products, and services — and to fuel top-line growth opportunities.

He works with clients across Asia Pacific, as well as the Americas and Europe. He regularly partners with firms to reinvent their business strategy, rethink their priorities, and to modernize their technology while accounting for rapidly changing customer needs. He understands his clients’ realities and thrives on helping them innovate and strengthen relationships with their customers while factoring existing challenges.

Asia’s unprecedented wave of wealth creation and transfer is reshaping the future of the global insurance industry. In this episode of Reinventing Insurance, Edward Moncreiffe, CEO Insurance at HSBC Group, joins our host Paul Ricard to explore emerging market opportunities and the biggest macroeconomic trends redefining the region’s sector. Based in Hong Kong, Edward draws on nearly two decades of experience working across multiple continents. He articulates a clear vision of the insurance industry’s future in Asia, marked by significant demographic shifts, a rich cultural landscape, and the imperative for digital transformation.

Edward’s insights provide valuable guidance for insurance and financial services leaders to navigate market complexities while remaining focused on customer needs and sustainable growth. He sheds light on the convergence of wealth management and insurance solutions and where this is leading to more comprehensive insurance, investment, and health insurance offerings, as well as fueling deeper engagement with customers.

In this episode, Edward and Paul also share perspectives on:

• Leveraging generative artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation for customer engagement and service models.
• Significant wealth transfer opportunities for insurers to serve legacy planning needs and the changing demographic shifts as older generations retire.
• Sustainable growth opportunities for insurance carriers by reshaping their technology, distribution strategies, and strengthening relationships with distribution partners.
• The lasting resilience and balance of face-to-face distribution alongside digital servicing.
• Building a strong organizational culture focused on talent development and employee empowerment which leads to improved performance and innovation.
• Vibrant and emerging opportunities in Hong Kong as it becomes a major global insurance powerhouse amid geopolitical and economic shifts.

This episode is part of our Reinventing Insurance series that explores best practices for taking a CustomerFirst approach to innovation within insurance. Throughout this series, host Paul Ricard discusses lessons, challenges, and new ways of working with guests who will share their first-hand experiences.

Subscribe for more on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Mega trends shaping the future of the insurance industry

Paul Ricard: Welcome to Reinventing Insurance. Today, I’m pleased to welcome Edward Moncreiffe, who is the Group CEO of HSBC Life. Welcome, Ed.

Edward Moncreiffe: Thank you for having me, Paul.

Paul: Ed, I have to tell you, I feel like I’m braving the weather today to be with you. We’re in Hong Kong, and it’s typhoon season. I think we’re somewhere between an amber and a red storm right now.

Edward: It’s black rain outside, which is why we look as we do, right?

Paul: Yeah, so hopefully we’re obviously safe here. We’ll see how the rest of the day turns out. Without further ado, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey in the insurance industry, Ed?

Edward: Sure. First of all, thank you for having me. It’s my first podcast, so go easy on me. I started 19 years ago as an insurance broker at a company called HSBC Insurance Brokers and Lloyd’s of London, the old HSBC Gibbs business, which HSBC had purchased, I think, in the late 70s, before it even bought Midland Bank, to get a foothold in the London market. I had tried and failed to be a journalist, which was my dream when I was younger.

Paul: There must be a dream now for you to be on a podcast.

Edward: You would have thought these things would have existed 19 years ago; maybe careers would have panned out very differently. But I realized I wasn’t very good at writing, and there really wasn’t much money in it for a 22-year-old junior sports reporter at the Daily Telegraph.

So, the job I managed to land was on the graduate scheme of an insurance broker. I spent my first couple of years in Lloyd’s of London placing various risks — mainly marine, cargo, energy, aviation — and doing the ferrying jobs that junior brokers would do, shuttling to and from Leadenhall Market for liquid and refreshments. After that, I was taken by the group, by the HSBC Group, to head office to work in strategy and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) for a while. I spent some time in Ireland running our reinsurance company during the crisis and exiting some of the liabilities and risks we had accumulated there. I spent some time in Brazil running our pensions business, which was a fascinating time. Then I moved to Hong Kong. I left Copacabana Beach on New Year’s Day with my wife in January 2016, and 36 hours later, we turned up in Hong Kong. I ran our insurance company here — the life and health company — for seven and a half years. It was a fabulous time, and we created a very strong market-leading franchise. Then, in the first quarter of last year, I became the global CEO for our insurance franchise.

It’s been a really interesting journey across multiple jurisdictions and a prolonged shift from non-life to life, from London to Hong Kong. I’ve learned a little over the years but have been privileged to learn from many very smart people around the world. Hopefully, maybe one day someone will say the same about me. Still got a long way to go.

Paul: Congrats on the latest role opportunity. I was going to say you’ve seen one company, one group, but many different facets of the insurance industry in the process. Tell us a little about your current role and about HSBC Life as well. What’s the scope? What does it cover? What’s a day in your life as the Group CEO for HSBC Life?

Edward: Sure. I’ll steal a memorable TripAdvisor review of the Victoria and Albert Museum café in London.

Paul: I thought you were going to say something about HSBC Life.

Edward: They’ve said this is one of the greatest cafés in the world with a nice museum attached to it. That’s how I see my role. Obviously, we’re part of one of the world’s largest financial organizations — a US$3 trillion balance sheet across around 60-odd markets around the world — a real financial behemoth. I’m responsible for all of our insurance operations, which are predominantly in Asia, where we are leading. We are the number one life and health insurer in Hong Kong. We own 100% our businesses in Macau, Mainland China, and Singapore. We have a very large joint venture in India. We also have businesses in Bermuda, Mexico, and across Europe, and where we don’t underwrite or manufacture, we are obviously a distributor as a bank, as a licensed intermediary. I have accountability for that. The HSBC Life business has about US$120 billion of assets. It’s a big business. If you look at our Q1 results for the group, you can see we’re generating US$1 billion of new business contractual service margin (CSM) — that’s deferred International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) profits from new business. It’s growing very fast. We’re a key growth engine for the group, capitalizing particularly in this part of the world on the wealth creation, wealth transfer, and wealth growth happening in these economies and societies.

Paul: Let’s start talking about the macro trends. I’d be very keen to hear from your standpoint, obviously maybe focusing on Asia. What are some of the biggest macro trends you’ve seen reshaping the insurance industry landscape from a demand standpoint in the last few years? Obviously, a lot has been happening with China — the rebalance between China and the rest of the region. I’d love to get your views on that. What else has been really top of mind and the biggest influences from your standpoint?

Edward: Sure. I think “macro trend” is the right way to frame this. We’re, as an industry, not a reactionary industry. When we behave that way, we get into trouble. We are a long-term anticipatory industry, and it is the macro trend that drives our agenda.

I’m a big believer in demographic destiny, particularly for life and health. If you look at the US market as an example, there’s massive growth coming from retirement annuities. You don’t need a crystal ball — just a basic grasp of demographics to figure out that the baby boomer generation would be coming to the end of their accumulation phase and going into decumulation.

We see similar, not the same but similar, dynamics in Asia. What’s really interesting, particularly in places like China, is the first-generation wealth creators — literally the first families, entrepreneurs, business owners, patriarchs, and matriarchs who have created significant wealth — reaching an age where wealth transfer and legacy have come to the forefront. You have to be careful about stereotyping and overgeneralizing, but one thing I’ve seen very differently in the East and the West is the concept of legacy. It’s all-encompassing, particularly in certain Asian cultures. It’s not just about accumulating or consuming all of my wealth until it’s gone; it’s really about transferring wealth. We’re seeing massive pools of wealth looking to be transferred from the first generation to the second and sometimes even third generation in Asia. This is an amazing tailwind for us as an insurance industry. The fundamental purpose of our contracts is to transfer wealth between an insured and a beneficiary, and our products and solutions provide many advantages as to why that’s a good choice today.

First, I’d say for the aging population in Asia, particularly the aging of first-generation wealth creators, it’s all about this tidal wave of wealth creation and wealth transfer.

The second thing, more recent and seen really in the last five to 10 years rather than the past 20 to 30 years, is the internationalization of wealth and financial planning, and the role of life insurance within that. We sit here in Hong Kong, an international financial center. Last year, our Hong Kong business wrote insurance contracts on people from 50 different countries of residences. Our Singapore business is very similar. The ability now for wealth to flow across markets and for estate and legacy planning to be carried out across markets is really interesting.

If we look at the three major flows particularly of interest to me and my business, it is the Greater China flow, which largely but not exclusively comes to Hong Kong; the ASEAN flow, with huge wealth accumulated in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, largely but not exclusively going to Singapore; and then the Middle East and the NRI — the non-resident Indian population — which goes to Bermuda and in some parts of Singapore and Hong Kong as well. It is demographics around aging, wealth transfer, and internationalization of wealth.

Paul: I totally hear you. The aging generation is bringing it back to the scale and growth of that need. You talked about internationalization. One thing I’m curious about is how you see the needs having evolved. You talked a lot about first-generation wealth. How would you address the needs of the person from 10 or 20 years ago versus now? How has it evolved? Is it more complex? Does it require much more tailored propositions for very different personas?

Edward: Very good question. Maybe I’d answer it in two ways — give a bit of a cop-out answer. The answer is kind of yes and no.

On the intermediary and advice side, absolutely. There is now a very clear differentiation between advisory and distribution. People have been predicting the decline of tied agencies in Asia forever, and it hasn’t happened. I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon because there are very deep-rooted cultural and community factors that will sustain that. But what we’ve seen is the emergence of a level of tailorization. One of your businesses is a good partner of ours; Mercer PCS is an example of that. You do need a specific level of intellectual capital and ability to manage and advise on wealth and asset allocation and everything that goes with that. As part of a bank, that also gives us a competitive advantage because people typically look to us for things like asset allocation. We’ve been advertising our internationality for 30 years. This is an inherent source of strength.

On the product side, I don’t think I’ve seen massive shifts in product. Yes, we’ve seen the emergence of more index-linked products, more exotic linked solutions with various caps and collars, derivatives, and everything else, but it’s nothing that hasn’t existed in the West for a number of years. As insurers, we tend to — apologies to my product colleagues — sometimes overplay our product innovation. Frankly, within insurance, innovation may not always be the best thing.

What I’d say is the key trend I’ve seen in the past five to six years is a flight to quality, a flight to risk aversion, because this has been an enormously turbulent time over the past 10 years across the world, particularly in Asia. The way COVID landed, and some of the trade and geopolitical challenges that have manifested over the past eight to 12 years, have reinforced this. What you haven’t seen in most parts of Asia, which you did see in the West, particularly in the US, was massive public market valuation growth. The S&P is trending at like two times what it was 10 years ago. I look at the Hang Seng Index; it’s still down on where it was in 2019. If you look at property prices across Greater China and most of Asia, again. Many consumers and savers in Asia are wrestling with very different dynamics than people in the West. Insurance continues to over-index as a safe haven, something which will not lose you money, something which can offset negative spreads or negative equity you’re getting elsewhere in your wealth portfolio.

I have seen products start to take significantly different asset allocations. The way insurers, perhaps somewhat similar to the US, have started to include much larger allocations to private markets in how they manage their balance sheets, their general account products, and how they are then able to offer customers more illiquid, long-term, better-yielding options. That’s a very important trend in Asia. In the absence of a massive re-rating of stock markets or properties, which are the other two alternative wealth accumulation vehicles in Asia, you have to be pretty bullish that the growth of insurance as a preferred financial product will continue for some time.

Paul: That makes a lot of sense. You use the word wealth a lot. I always joke that if you ask five different experts in wealth management for the definition of wealth management, they may give you different answers. One question for you: I heard you mentioned aging and almost talked about a loose correlation between an aging population and increasingly wealthy pools of populations in need of insurance. If you move beyond that, thinking about the mass market or mass affluence, the younger generations, what trends are you seeing there? How do you see the insurance needs there?

Edward: To my point around losing bets against agency and tied distribution, there’s a big contrast, in my view, between the West and the East on this. In many parts of the West, insurance has become either a luxury good — you need to be a certain wealth to benefit from the fiscal or scale advantages it brings — or it’s mandatory. It’s like tax. You just have to do it, whether it’s a pension or motor insurance. That’s why the old jokes about dinner parties in London where you never want to say you work in insurance because people see it as either a luxury good or a tax. Both have social connotations.

But in Asia, if I may be so bold, insurance is still a very aspirational, socially respected, and socially essential means of wealth accumulation. I can’t think of a single city or country in this part of the world where you don’t have a sizable part of the community who works for or with the insurance industry. Hong Kong is a great example. People have this image of Hong Kong as owners of skyscrapers and capital markets, but 3.5% of the population sells insurance — about 120,000 licensed intermediaries in this city. That is not uncommon in other cities, both developed and developing, in Asia.

Insurance intermediation in Asia and in urban Asia has become a way to serve the wealth accumulation needs of the younger population, the more mass population. On that basis, insurance is deeply rooted in society. Everyone has a family member or friend who works in insurance, sells insurance, or is an agent at XYZ or broker ABC. It is a very socially accepted and preferred vehicle, trusted on that basis because it has human and familial instincts.

The second point I mentioned earlier is important: Alternative mechanisms for wealth accumulation have failed to preserve wealth. Every market in Asia has been through numerous stock market crashes, economic volatility, and property booms and busts. Insurance is a safe haven, the calm in the storm. In high-savings cultures like Asia, that will continue. Frankly, the only thing the insurance industry has to fear, and the one thing we should be so focused on, is making sure we don’t trip ourselves up, which is largely going to be conduct, maybe solvency, asset-liability matching, and other things. But the biggest risk to our own inexorable growth in this part of the world is ourselves.

Paul: By the way, speaking of Hong Kong, it’s obviously a major global insurance hub, as you were talking about, with a very special role. There’s obviously been a lot happening. I would be curious to hear your view on how Hong Kong is evolving and where you see things going in the coming years in the region and globally when it comes to the insurance industry.

Edward: I’m very pro-Hong Kong. It’s been my home for nearly a decade. My kids were born here. I used to chair the Insurance Federation here. Hong Kong’s life market, frankly, is a bit of a unicorn. I say that because I think it’s the most penetrated market on earth. It’s the highest density insurance market on earth, but it’s also one of the fastest growing markets on earth. It’s not rocket science. It’s because you have tens and tens, arguably 100-plus million of emerging affluent and all the way up to ultra-high-net-worth Mainland Chinese. The Hong Kong life insurance industry, I think, has developed over time very successfully to go beyond its natural borders. I don’t just mean geographic — obviously, for regulatory and legal reasons — but in terms of its products, which have become genuine wealth management products.

If you had looked at the market 30 years ago, this was a market selling term life and mortgage assurance and everything else. But if you look at what the market sells now, these are wealth accumulation, wealth decumulation, wealth transfer, long-term care — every single need, whether for retirement, education, legacy, or protection, can now be met pretty adequately  and successfully by the life insurance industry in Hong Kong.

If I look at the Greater Bay Area, for example, there are 83 million people. It’s more than the population of the UK. And it’s increasingly a common market. There’s freedom of movement of people, goods, and services. The volumes that Hong Kong can still serve as an international financial capital from the Greater Bay Area, from Mainland China, from Asia — because it’s not just China, although China is the lion’s share — make this market very attractive now. It can’t get complacent.

When I used to run the Federation, we spent a lot of time with government and regulators saying Hong Kong has many natural competitive advantages: the rule of law and contract law that’s been here for many years, which is the basis of any insurance industry; the English language, the language of business; and the geographical proximity, being the bridge between China and the world. All three of those things can weaken over time or be shocked by competitive markets and jurisdictions. But as long as Hong Kong continues to place emphasis on its stability — its political and legal stability and reliability — it is where global capital comes to do business. As long as it preserves that international business strength and takes advantage of that bridge into and out of China, I think Hong Kong is going to be very successful.

It is now very much a life and health market. Property and casualty (P&C) would be the flip side, frankly. Despite having competitive advantages around large, massive trading ports and significant freight and cargo volumes, Hong Kong never managed to evolve its ancillary insurance industry — P&C, marine, aviation, and everything else — in a way it could have. Now it’s very difficult because once an ecosystem is created, whether that be Lloyd’s of London, Bermuda, or Singapore for this line of business, it’s very difficult for other markets to catch up.

So, with Hong Kong, it is a lopsided market. My personal view — and I’m not going to make myself popular with everyone — is that it will continue to be more and more lopsided over time and will be a life, investment, and health market.

Paul: Very interesting. Shifting gears a little, we started to get into this. We were talking about the evolution of industry and the ecosystem itself. I’d love for you to elaborate on what we were starting to discuss earlier in terms of how you see the overall insurance ecosystem evolving. In particular, how carriers are evolving their value proposition, distribution strategies, and relationships with distribution partners. You hinted that it varies depending on the part of the market you’re after. We’d love to get some of your views on that.

Edward: Lots of views. I think distribution has not evolved in Asia to the extent that people thought it would. I’m not just talking about tied channels, but generally. It hasn’t been shocking. Many said digital would take over. It hasn’t. Culturally and from a complexity perspective, this is still an advised, face-to-face driven industry.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for digital to play. I’m a big believer in the omni-channel model. I always say we have an insurance company in your pocket because with our mobile banking apps, our two million policyholders in Asia can do anything they want with their insurance with their mobile phone. Are they going to apply for universal life policies on their mobile banking app? It seems unlikely. Digital has become much more of a servicing and engagement capability rather than a sales or distribution capability.

We haven’t seen much integration or value chain integration between distribution and manufacturing — some of it for regulatory reasons, some because capital has, as in parts of the West, very clearly bifurcated between distribution and manufacturing.

Our view is that our ability to provide a one-stop shop — maybe not be the right word — but our ability to own the value chain where we can and choose to give us massive and unreplicable competitive advantages versus pure-play peers who play in particular segments.

I’ll give you a recent example. We launched a new index universal life product in Hong Kong this week. Great products: cap and collar, S&P, Hang Seng Index, gold indexes. What’s interesting is every part of the value chain is managed by HSBC, and it’s written on HSBC Life paper. The indexes are provided by HSBC Asset Management, custody by HSBC Security Services, derivatives by HSBC Global Markets, and distribution through HSBC Private Bank. Our ability to own the value chain, price the value chain, and between different sectors subsidize it rather than compete, gives us the opportunity to reflect that in higher returns on capital for shareholders or better pricing for customers. That’s really exciting. There’ll be more to come on how we can configure genuinely unreplicable solutions. The big question then becomes: who do you pass that on to — shareholders, customers, intermediaries, or all?

Paul: You obviously have the ability to own the value chain where you choose. There seem to be more examples of this coming up. What do you think is the hardest part for some of your competitors to replicate? If someone were to assemble the right sum of parts with the right partnerships, what do you think is the hardest part for them to replicate that would be unique to your group?

Edward: Good question. I’m going to try to answer with a terrible metaphor. I have a 6-year-old son obsessed with Lego, and my house is covered in Lego. Anyone can build Lego if you have all the pieces and instructions. But if you don’t have the instructions and all the pieces, it’s a lot harder.

I think the challenge is procuring the various components of the value chain with a commensurate level of risk appetite. When every player in the value chain has their own minimum hurdles, you get into a value capture conversation rather than value creation. That’s the hardest part. It’s not that it can’t be done; there are many examples of great partnerships, including one of your sister companies. We have great partnerships with third parties, which will be critical to our future, but not all of them work. You’re inherently geared towards supply-demand dynamics and negotiations.

Even if you land at that sweet spot where everyone wins, the time to get to the market is significantly longer, and opportunity costs are higher. Using Hong Kong as an example, there’s a reason no one else has been able, since regulation changes, to release a genuine universal life legacy protection plan at our speed — we have all the pieces of the Lego box and the instruction manual. That doesn’t mean we always get it right, and sometimes we end up building the wrong things. But time to market and the ability to work towards a common, consistent return on capital or internal rate of return (IRR) or risk-weighted return rather than trading off constituent parts is key.

Paul: Going back to the digital front, I have to throw in AI at some point. You said earlier we haven’t seen a massive shock to distribution in the insurance industry in the East. You also mentioned that digital is less about going hard at digital as a channel on its own but more about servicing. If I fast forward five years, how do you see that evolving? We talked about omni-channel. How do you see the role of digital evolving and the role of an agent or a relationship manager?

Edward: Timely question. With the insanely fast developments in AI and large language models over the past couple of years, this is a tipping point. I do think things may change quickly.

We’ve been using AI for years; its core to our pricing. We run incredibly complex data-driven models and algorithms every day on the liability side. We are not so much on distribution — now we are, because we have many copilot-type tools. How do we make our agents in Singapore, bankers in Hong Kong, brokers in China more productive? There are many off-the-shelf tools we can use so that, before you meet with Paul, while on the train or in the car, you can have a more informed meeting because you can scrape huge amounts of detail about Paul, markets, and the world to have a better, more productive client meeting.

We see AI as a copilot for our supply chain, distributors, and intermediaries. What may change is it becoming a copilot for buyers, consumers, and customers. If customers around the world and customers in Asia, now can use Google, Gemini, ChatGPT, or others to help them choose the right hotel when they go on holiday in Thailand, or to help them book the right restaurant that they’re looking for in a particular city, why wouldn’t they use these tools to plan for the future, buy insurance, select retirement funds, or choose medical insurance partners? Why wouldn’t they? We need to be aware that our customers may change, and it may happen overnight. As we’ve seen in other industries, it may go overnight, and we need to be ready for that.

Paul: I’ll share a couple of hypotheses with you that I’d love your take on.

My first hypothesis is that people who manage to stay ahead are those who are flexible and nimble enough to adapt to new tools and technologies, constantly curious and integrating them into their workflow. It’s not once and done; we’re moving from binary to quantum shifts.

The other point, linked to your point about ChatGPT becoming an insurance adviser, is that in insurance, we’re still at the “point in time” engagement, and there’s engaging at the right moments. But is there a way — whether wealth management or financial wellness — to be truly “always on”, providing the right guidance and perspectives? Linking this to omni-channel, being always in your pocket but also giving access to the right person to engage at the right time, transforming infrequent pushes to constant engagement.

Edward: Completely agree. Your first point is absolutely right. This is a journey. Insurers, banks, and financial institutions that get on that journey now and continue to iterate as users, buyers, renters, and occasionally makers of these tools and capabilities are the ones that will thrive in the future.

The hardest part, not just in my organization but any large organization, is starting the journey — even the low-hanging fruit around workforce efficiency and productivity such as board papers and meeting minutes. AI tools can take out hundreds of hours of manpower a month and redirect that manpower into more productive value activities. We started doing that, but it took us too long to do that. The point is to start small and keep building. Organizations that resist this are like King Canute standing in front of the tide trying to push it back — it won’t end well.

To your second point, this is really interesting — that “always on” advice. There are constraints and barriers: regulatory, risk appetite, which is linked. We don’t want to turn hundreds of millions of retail customers into active hedge fund traders acting on every market update. We’re in the long-term business but need to engage customers more frequently than before.

We now do a lot of push notifications. With tech and data convergence, we have that capability on our apps. Push opens amazing opportunities to engage dynamically and personally in ways SMS, email, or letters never could.

On the health side, we’re close to being “always on”. Investments in our health business include AI supplementary tools for diagnostics, triage through virtual consultation capabilities, working with partners to match outpatient and group medical clients to doctors for phone diagnosis instead of going to the doctor. We procure drugs and treatment centrally and dispatch them. Within four hours, customers have it at home.

We’ve learned from Uber, our virtual consultation model. We do about 1,000 virtual consultations a week. It’s an Uber model. All we’re doing is connecting demand with a pool of qualified professional supply on a time-match basis rather than queuing. Don’t go to a taxi rank and queue, don’t go to a doctor and queue. Then the fulfillment piece, post-diagnosis, is the Amazon model, which is: if you centralize procurement, you get massive economies of scale and very good price certainty. In medical business, the thing that kills you is cost — expense creep and margin dilution. That other thing is a great example of how our customers know, wherever they are, whatever they’re doing, and whatever time of the day, can consume their medical insurance and services from us. “Always on.” That’s really powerful.

We’re not there yet on the life insurance side. My challenge there is I’m not sure we want to be, because we may end up triggering — our actuaries will be terrified about dynamic lapse modeling — if we constantly bombard our customers with messages.

But I do think you’re right. In terms of acquisition and new clients, it gives us an opportunity to engage with a historically underserved section of society and the potential customer base of tomorrow in a way that maybe we wouldn’t have done without this.

I do think we have crossed the bridge now. In the past 20 years, we don’t like  to contact customers. We thought it’s risky as customers might complain, and then regulators might get upset. Now, actually, we can — and we do — contact our customers as frequently as technology and relevance allow us to.

Paul: If you look at the US life insurance market, I feel like every player has picked a strategy of where they play and where they do not play. We’ve seen players really doubling down on distribution, doubling down on more asset-light type products, or doubling down on being more of an asset management–led player. Being a product manufacturer in the US feels like a losing game many times. How do you see a similar dynamic potentially playing out in Asia for insurers?

Edward: Good question. When I was in the US recently for The Geneva Association, it was very interesting — the first time I’ve been there in a long time — to see the evolution of that market. To your point, the convergence of the asset side with the liability side, and the asset side effectively owning the liability side. My experience growing up in the UK is very different — the liability side on the asset side. So, it’s quite an interesting paradigm.

I think in Asia, you see some of that. I’d like to think we’re kind of at the forefront. We’ve got many examples where we’ve used our bank to originate assets, private credit, to give us risk-weighted yield pickup, which then backs liabilities that we can hold. Obviously, we were not consolidated from a capital perspective into the bank. Long-dated credit assets are very expensive for banks to hold. If you think about things like infrastructure, data, and climate transition financing. These are great assets for us — they’re long duration, very high quality, and have very strong cash flow predictability.

So, I think that is happening among some of us. Saying Asia as one homogenous market is hard, because Asia is a large market of very different markets. The dynamics even between Hong Kong and Singapore, or Hong Kong and Mainland China, are very different. What we would do on the asset side in Hong Kong is very different from what we can or could do in Mainland China. So, it’s very difficult to choose a lane. That’s your point: let’s choose a lane, but being in that lane across Asia is very tough. I think what insurers and financial institutions do now in Asia involves a participation question at a market level: which market do we want to be in, and which do we not want to be in? I don’t think in the US you say, “I’ll be in New York, but I won’t be in Pennsylvania.” Despite state regulation, you’re in the market. But in Asia, those are key decisions that have to be made. The lanes you play may be different market to market. The mix is very different. Some intermediary dynamics are very different.

India is a fascinating market for us. We’ve got great business there. But in India, if I look at product margins on an embedded value (EV) basis, these are mature market margins in an emerging market. So, we face big strategic questions around which parts of the value chain you’re going to play in. In China, when you’ve got 30-year government bonds yielding 1.8%, you think you should do distribution in China, but regulations cap distribution and brokerage commissions there as well. So within what is currently a low-yield market, which parts of the value chain can you preserve your returns frankly? Because in the long run, this is the world’s biggest market — bigger than all other Asian markets combined. You’re really in return preservation mode to benefit over the medium and long term.

Certainly, a long-winded question: we haven’t seen yet the Athena, Apollo, Global Atlantic model really takes off from a primary perspective in Asia. I’m not sure it will. I think there are regulatory and nationalistic dynamics that may prevent that because it would be largely US-led, and I’m not sure it’s the right time for that. What we have seen — and again, we’re a major player in this — is Bermuda. We’ve seen huge amounts of insurers, as all these markets move into risk-based capital (RBC) regimes, very incentivized to get lower-yielding, higher-cost, enforce portfolios off. Bermuda has been very effective, and we’ve got our business there. The market has been very effective at acquiring those portfolios and providing reinsurance risk transfer, whether it’s IFRS 17, whether it’s RBC. Reinsurance is continually a preferred and economically sensible solution to that. Some of that underlying risk is backed by the same private capital names you mentioned earlier. So, you’ll see more of that. I think you’ll see more risk transfer, more reinsurance into private markets indirectly. I don’t think we’ll see the shift directly at this stage.

Paul: Terrific. Shifting us to our final chapter, we’d love to — I think we’re nicely warmed up about a lot of these topics — we’d love to get your views on your CEO agenda. Looking at your customers and markets, even internally, what’s top of mind for you over the next three to five years?

Edward: Our strategy is very simple: wealth, health, and high net worth. Our wealth business is about integrating, to the highest level possible, our insurance franchise within an integrated insurance and investment wealth advisory capability from HSBC. We do that very well in some markets; we have improvements to make in others. Sometimes insurance is an augmentation to that wealth capability because we can provide distribution capacity beyond a bricks-and-mortar perimeter.

It’s health because medical prices constantly outstrip inflation. We have tremendous unreplicable competitive advantages because we are in payments; we can move cash around the system faster. We have a large corporate bank that allows us to have persistence gains with major clients. Those are the two key things.

High net worth is critical. We are a leading high net worth provider and hold a Guinness World Record for the largest individual life insurance policy ever written. My Singapore and Hong Kong businesses are competing to see who will break that record. I can’t share specifics about the person; otherwise, we’ll never write another policy again. The previous world record holder, according to Guinness, was issued in California about 10 years ago, by all guesses a gentleman called Elon Musk. I’m not sure we could afford to underwrite him anymore. He was way ahead of his time, looking at insurance as a way to leverage your estate.

High net worth is critical for us. We’re fortunate in our Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bermuda businesses to have those capabilities and that internationalization of wealth. Twenty years ago, you needed to plant your flag in every country to be in every country. Now, you don’t. You don’t have to build technology platforms, hire people, and have capital in every market because if you’re playing in the higher net worth space, this is onshore to offshore business anyway.

Those are the three strategies for us. I need to do the basics: continue to grow double-digit. If you look at our Q1 results, we’re growing our business CSM by 40% plus, at US$1 billion a quarter, and we need to continue to grow double-digit. We need to re-shift our participation because capital, technology allocations, and time are finite. You’ll have seen recent news — we’ve made moves in Europe, France, and the UK. That’s not because we don’t like those businesses; it’s because we need to be more focused on where our highest growth and returns are and be relentless in chasing those returns.

The third thing is future proofing. As a CEO, it comes down to leaving the business in better shape than you inherited it. That’s about balance sheet stability, market share, earnings, and mostly people. Future-proofing our business with leadership capability, talent, pipelines, and culture. Culture — my boss always says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Everyone has the same strategy but has a culture and leadership where people make decisions, hold themselves accountable, make collective decisions but act individually with bravery and efficiency — that’s when we outperform. So, it’s growth, participation and allocation decisions, and people and culture.

Paul: I have an interesting anecdote about Elon Musk and insurance. When Tesla started Tesla Insurance, in one investor presentation, Elon was asked about insurance. He said, “We love insurance, great business to be in,” obviously on the P&C side. He said, “We love actuaries. They do math, they’re great, and they do it on very interesting things. At Tesla, we’re looking to hire revolutionary actuaries.” Interestingly, I know the person who was the first hire as the revolutionary actuary. Her title is “Revolutionary Actuary,” actually, which was overridden by Elon Musk. She’s now a Senior Revolutionary Actuary.

Edward: You don’t want to turn up at our group risk management forum with that title for sure.

Paul: There’s an interesting point there. You’re talking about culture and all these things. In a world where insurance institutional knowledge, experience, and risk management are important, being able to adapt and be flexible is also important. That idea of revolutionary talent — having that expertise but also being open to everything happening around you — is an interesting balance we need to keep in our industry.

Edward: I agree. We talked before about the long-term risks of relevancy for our industry. That comes down to people. Are we building human capital? Are we attracting the next generation of human capital into our industry directly or adjacently? When I look to hire people, it’s IQ and EQ. Historically, we hired people with the highest IQ — the best underwriters, investment managers, intermediaries. Now it’s much more about EQ, being lateral, really getting to the bottom of trends, consumer behavior, supply chain behavior, and everything else. So, we do need to start looking at the people we hire and being more diverse and inclusive in a macro way.

Paul: We’re coming up on time. Before we wrap, one final question for you, based on everything we discussed. Any few final words of wisdom for our audience?

Edward: I’ve never been accused of being wise. I have also never been accused of just providing a few words. So that’s quite a challenge for me.

I think for those listeners who are not as close as perhaps we are to Asia right now, this is such an exciting part of the world. It’s too easy to just say this is where growth is because it’s so much more complex and multifaceted than this. But I do see Asia really driving the global life and health agenda for some time to come. Asia needs to step up to the market globally and better represent itself within this industry. Also, globally, I think we need to spend more time spotlighting and profiling Asia on that basis.

Paul: Ed, thank you so much for your time.

Edward: Thank you. Pleasure.

Paul: Thank you very much for this. That was Edward Moncreiffe, who is the Group CEO for HSBC Life. I’m Paul Ricard. Thanks for listening and I’ll catch you next time.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Edward Moncreiffe serves as the CEO of HSBC’s global insurance operations spanning Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Since joining HSBC Group in 2005, Ed has held numerous senior leadership roles across various sectors, including broking, underwriting, reinsurance, life, and non-life insurance lines, and has contributed to Group Strategy. After relocating to Hong Kong in 2016, he served as CEO of HSBC Insurance (Asia) Limited and HSBC Life (International) Limited, managing HSBC’s insurance businesses in Hong Kong and Macao.

Outside of HSBC, Ed serves as the chairman at the Hong Kong Federation of Insurers (HKFI) and is a member of the General Committee of the Insurance Complaints Bureau (ICB). He also participates in the Economic Policy Committee and the Financial and Treasury Services Committee of The Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce. Additionally, Ed chairs the board of Governors of Matilda International Hospital and the City Mental Health Alliance HK, and serves on the board of the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) Principles of Sustainable Insurance (PSI).

Ed earned a bachelor of arts from the University of Durham, UK, and a master of business administration from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is also a chartered insurer, accredited by the Chartered Insurance Institute.

Oliver Wyman Partner and Head of Asia Pacific Insurance and Asset Management, Paul Ricard is based in Singapore. Paul works closely with businesses to reinvent their strategies, products, and services — and to fuel top-line growth opportunities.

He works with clients across Asia Pacific, as well as the Americas and Europe. He regularly partners with firms to reinvent their business strategy, rethink their priorities, and to modernize their technology while accounting for rapidly changing customer needs. He understands his clients’ realities and thrives on helping them innovate and strengthen relationships with their customers while factoring existing challenges.