Recruiting and training insurance agents is a regular job of life insurance companies because this recruitment is based on the number of agents and the expansion plan of the company’s network. However, this year the market may witness many different recruitment strategies from traditional ones.
According to statistics of the Vietnam Insurance Association (VIA), the number of newly recruited agents of insurers annually increases by over 20 percent. Insurers with high numbers of agents recruited are the top ones in market share such as Bao Viet, Prudential, Manulife, and Dai-ichi Life Vietnam.
In the recent time, some insurance companies in the lower top, since having market expansion plans, have started to accelerate the recruitment of agents, such as Hanwha Life Vietnam, generali, and Sun Life.
Data of the VIA showed that the total number of agents present at the market by the end of September 2017 is over 570,000 agents, up by over 20 percent compared to the end of 2016. “This number continues to increase according to the development of insurance companies as well as the growth of the market. In addition, small insurers which have newly entered the market or insurance joint ventures are having new recruitment strategies”, said a representative of an insurer.
He believed that the insurance companies mainly selling products via specialised distribution channels in the past such as banks now will have to adopt unique strategies in order to recruit new agents.
The development of insurance agents in the current traditional way will make it fairly difficult for these insurers, because they will have to spend a lot if they want to recruit good agents who can immediately generate revenue; while the traditional recruitment consumes a lot of time with unsure efficiency. “In addition to further cooperating with banks in selling insurance products, we will continue to exploit our existing partnership to develop an approach to find customers. Along with these methods, to expand the market and find more customers, we will also develop some new insurance selling channels. This perhaps will be different compared to the current insurance companies”, said a leader of an insurance company which mainly sells products via banking channel.
Previously, in late 2017, talking to reporter of Dau tu Chung khoan newspaper, general director of an insurance joint venture shared that his company is looking for a direction to develop agent model. Currently, the company has made a shift in recruiting and training sales staff in a different way. Leader of the joint venture said that the company will soon announce the recruitment of new agents, possibly in this March.
Concerning the development of human resource, in mid-2017, Samsung Life Insurance Company (SLI from South Korea) has signed a memorandum of cooperation with Insurance Research and Training centre under the Management Department with the aim to share experience in administrative management and human resource training and development, exchanging insurance expertise, and cooperating and exchanging in insurance in general and management of agents in particular between Vietnam and South Korea.
SLI has not yet established a life insurance business entity in Vietnam but its representative office has been operating for many years. The cooperation in the development of insurance human resource with Vietnamese market may be one of the next steps to penetrate the market of SLI, but may be mere exchange of expertise.
Nevertheless, according to experts in the industry, in addition to capital, experience and investment in technology, the preparation of skilled human resource, including the sales force, is always an important factor, and even the survival factor for insurance companies which have just entered the insurance market of Vietnam.
