Business Takaful

Source: The Star, 11th December 2007

KUALA LUMPUR: Prudential BSN Takaful Bhd (PruBSN) is poised to become one of the leading takaful operators in Malaysia, judging by the rapid growth of its new regular contributions in a short span of time.

Chief executive officer Mohamad Salihuddin Ahmad said that for the first 10 months this year, the company had managed to secure record new regular contributions of more than RM100mil.

“This is an achievement as we only started operations about 15 months ago and in a relatively short period of time, we have become the number one takaful operator in terms of new regular contributions,” he said during an interview.

Since its inception, the company had raked in total new regular contributions of almost RM150mil and expects the figure to grow quite significantly.

PruBSN is a 49:51 joint venture between Prudential plc and Bank Simpanan Nasional (BSN).

Salihuddin attributed the record growth in new regular business premiums to various factors, including its dynamic agency force.

He added that currently about 95% of total sales were derived from the agency force, which currently stands at more than 8,000 from over 5,000 when it began operations. Of the present total agency force, 75% are non-Muslims.

He also said PruBSN had one of the highest productive agency forces in the industry. Within the first 10 months of the year, it managed to roll out 21 agency leaders who managed to individually secure million ringgit sales during the period.

Salihuddin said half of its more than 80,000 customers were non-Muslims, reflecting the growing awareness and importance of the takaful business.

Innovative products like Takafulink (a regular investmentlinked product) and Takafulink Cerdik (child education regular product) had also helped fuel new contributions, he said. PruBSN was also the first takaful operator to offer a medical card to its customers.

Bancatakaful was also another area the company hoped to tap to boost its presence in the takaful market. “We will tap on BSN branches to distribute our takaful products. At the moment, we have 23 takaful financial executives (TFEs) at selected BSN branches and hope to have at least 100 to 150 TFEs in all 375 BSN branches nationwide next year,” Salihuddin said.

Besides this initiative, the company had also spent more than RM2mil in advertising and promotion in the last few months to highlight its core takaful values – TRUST.

TRUST is the abbreviation for Trustworthy, Respect, Understanding, Smile and Teamwork.