A Malaysian national, Teck Seng said he learned early on after taking the company’s taking that openness, being consultative and engaging were of paramount importance to understanding client needs.

“As the client is our focus, we always strive to show empathy to them. So receiving views and inputs from the entire team is more important than just following my one-sided direction. This will not only help design products based on client needs, but also ensure client satisfaction and the sustainability of Sun Life’s insurance business,” Teck Seng said during a recent event at the company’s headquarters in Mega Kuningan, South Jakarta.

“Leadership is more about engagement, seeing the potentials and focusing on what we can do our best to serve clients,” he said.

According to Teck Seng, constant understanding of client needs, which ensured a client’s satisfaction through lifetime engagement, was a strategy to maintain Sun Life’s position as a trusted and reliable life insurance company.

Good and empathetic service was necessary to handle, for example, a client who was panicking about immediately settling their policy claim. “At Sun Life, we do our best to fulfill client needs,” he said.

In today’s digital age, clients had easy, convenient access to Sun Life, whether to purchase or renew a policy or to make a claim, but “we should humanize the technology to provide empathetically personalized services to clients,” emphasized Teck Seng.

A seasoned business leader with over 30 years of extensive experience in the financial services industry, Teck Seng was previously deputy CEO of Sun Life Malaysia before his July 2024 appointment as president director of Sun Life Indonesia.

In his new position, Teck Seng is responsible for managing Sun Life Indonesia’s growth and profitability, as well as developing the company’s business strategy.

Parent company Sun Life Financial Inc., founded in 1865, is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and operates in eight Asian markets: China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam.

Teck Seng said being a multinational company allowed Sun Life employees to exchange their local knowledge and technical know-how, as well as provide digital capabilities, IT support, which helped to improve its client-centric services overall.

“For example, to leverage the digital-based service system, Sun Life Indonesia can learn from its Regional counterpart,” he said.

Illustrating another example, Teck Seng said Sun Life’s clients in Malaysia and Indonesia equally needed basic protection. The two countries were slightly different in terms of distribution channels, however, because Indonesia was a vast country where collaborating with partners was necessary to reach different clients.

“Thanks to technology, we can reach more clients in need of protection,” he said.

“Based on the data, we learn that different clients of different ages need different types of protection, and that’s why at Sun Life, we provide lifetime financial security.”

Indonesia, with is large population dominated by the internet-savvy younger generation, had great market potential, “but we do not rush into it by claiming a certain percentage of targeted market share,” Teck Seng noted.

Instead, he continued, “we make sure we can establish our presence through our social responsibility, education and engagement with wider segments of society in order to promote insurance as life protection.”

Sun Life Indonesia focused on different segments of society through its various activities. In collaboration with its distribution channels, for example, the company provided financial education, public discussions and wealth management advice as part of its continuous efforts to increase insurance literacy in the country.

“We provide financial education to school children and, for young people that have just completed their studies, we educate them on how to manage their wealth,” he said.

To align with the global theme of “Healthy Lifestyle”, Sun Life Indonesia regularly held activities focusing on health issues, because “we are responsible for ensuring public health awareness, such as prevention of diabetes. So we are not merely focusing on our sales,” Teck Seng said.

According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 7 percent of the Indonesian population has diabetes, which is responsible for 6 percent of deaths each year.

Sun Life contributes to diabetes awareness, prevention and care through targeted activities. Since 2021, it organized Build Our Kids’ Success (BOKS) in Jakarta and East Indonesia to help school-aged kids getting physically active as a first step in preventing diabetes. In 2024, Sun Life founded Hoops+Health to revitalize sport facilities in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam and provide series of workshop to encourage active, healthy lifestyle for younger generations through basketball.​

Multichannel distribution

Teck Seng explained that in seizing the rich potential of Indonesia’s insurance market, Sun Life used the multichannel distribution approach, including bancassurance and agencies.

Sun Life Indonesia currently has 6,500  advisors supporting sales of both conventional and sharia insurance products.

Meanwhile, Teck Seng noted that bancassurance had become the increasingly preferred life insurance distribution channel over the past several years, which provided an efficient, convenient and confident means for banking customers to purchase their policies.

Sun Life offers both conventional and sharia-compliant products to cater to the different needs of its clients in Indonesia.

The rising demand for Sun Life Indonesia’s sharia products was driven in part by growing awareness among Muslim clients about the need to prepare financially for fulfilling Islam’s mandates, such as the haj and umrah (minor haj).

“As a life insurer, we want to make sure that all of our clients’ needs are fulfilled, whether through sharia-based products or conventional products. Fulfilling client needs is much more important,” Teck Seng emphasized.

To discover the real needs of its clients, Sun Life Indonesia trains its distribution channel personnel to conduct client analysis. The results obtained from this study provide the basis for designing innovative products that best suit the needs of local  clients.

It also runs an advisor empowerment program, and Teck Seng said he observed successful advisor of diverse cultures and norms exchanging their knowledge and experience during a recent sharing session at the insurer’s Vietnam office.

Sun Life is also continuing to scale up sales force capacities by providing easy access to updated training materials that encouraged them to focus more on listening to clients and their needs, rather pushing them to purchase a product.

The Sun Life Indonesia president director said he embraced a healthy lifestyle by exercising and maintaining a balanced diet, a large part of which were vegetables.

“I like klepon,” Teck Seng quipped with a smile, referring to the traditional Indonesian sweet of glutinous rice balls filled with palm syrup.

In conjunction with this year’s National Customers Day on Sept. 4, Teck Seng expressed his gratitude to Sun Life Indonesia’s clients and distribution partners for their continuous support over 29 years of its establishment.

“As we use a balanced approach, we pay heed not only to distribution channels, but also to social, health and educational programs. Apart from providing financial peace of mind through our products, we also engage clients and society as a whole,” he said.

Looking ahead, Sun Life Indonesia plans to deepen the partnership with Bank CIMB Niaga in providing a bancassurance distribution channel as part of efforts to expand its client base to serve banking customers.

“We also plan to invest more in increasing the number of our advisors to cover a larger part of Indonesia and to seize the great market opportunity for sharia-based products in the world’s largest Muslim population,” he said.

This article is in partnership with SunLife