Great Eastern nabs Technology Excellence Award for Fintech - Life Insurance

Its interactive financial planning tool helps clients identify wealth gaps and better prepare for what-if scenarios.

Committed to simplifying the complicated financial planning process for its clients, Great Eastern first rolled out its Financial Storyboard (FSB) in 2019, a cutting-edge, interactive financial planning tool that allows financial representatives to conduct holistic financial assessments and planning for customers.

With its unique feature to input ‘what if’ scenarios, this innovative tool can simulate possible outcomes and solutions when all financial decisions are aggregated over one’s lifetime. Through this, clients can effectively identify their protection and wealth gaps, and assess their affordability to commit to long-term investments.

With the FSB, its financial representatives can also engage in deeper and more insightful conversations with clients, as the platform moves the conversation away from a mere product sale to one where long-term goals are discussed, finances are stress-tested against pitfalls and potential solutions are developed. “As part of the interactive process, clients are more willing to share financial information with their advisors,” said Christine Cheah, VP of Digital for Business, Great Eastern. 

Retirement planning also becomes more realistic, as the FSB empowers clients with the financial knowledge to make decisions that will positively impact their lives in the near and far future. It is no longer about an advisor telling them what to do, but rather partnering with a client through the whole financial planning process, having the cradle to grave conversations and optimising solutions to help them plan for life.

The key success matrix for FSB includes high user adoption rates, a larger premium case size for submissions using FSB and positive responses from both Great Eastern financial representatives and clients. As of December 2021, 55% of its agency force have tried to use FSB, of which 40% are active users, whilst based on a survey, 86% of active users have expressed that FSB is intuitive and easy to use.

“The results also indicate that clients who go through the FSB process tend to purchase insurance with 9% higher coverage and premiums. This indicates that customers are more aware of their financial gaps after going through FSB, leading to an increased willingness to purchase higher premium products,” explained Cheah.

In recognition of its efforts to provide holistic financial planning for clients through the use of dynamic graphical representations, Great Eastern secured the Fintech - Life Insurance award at the recently concluded Technology Excellence Awards, presented by Singapore Business Review. In its fourth year, the awards event lauds companies in Singapore that have pioneered ground-breaking IT products, solutions or initiatives that are leading the technological revolution and digital journeys of their respective industries.

Cheah further explained that “the financial tools available to financial planners today are catered towards the analysis of one’s current financial situation and affordability, without catering to changes over the years. This leads to situations such as over-committing to big expenses, and being unable to retire or maintain one’s lifestyle when critical illness or disability strikes.”

With FSB, this silo situation analysis is removed and replaced with long-term projections that allow clients to visualise what might happen in the next 10, 20 and even 50 years.

As the population becomes more financially savvy, the firm is looking to evolve FSB and make it even more relevant to the needs of its users and clients. One of the upcoming plans is to integrate SGFindex into the FSB platform, which will allow consumers to seamlessly consolidate their financial data across different financial institutions, enabling customers to view their financial gaps in their entirety.

Watch the interview below to know more about their winning project: