18 December 2012 marked a historic date for ING Malaysia group of
companies where the acquisition by AIA Malaysia was completed. Companies affected were ING Insurance Berhad,
ING Employees Berhad and ING PUBLIC Takaful Ehsan Berhad (IPTEB). With the closure, AIA now owns two takaful
licenses thus it must relinquish one of the licenses under several
options. It may sell one of the entities
entirely to any interested party without affecting the business as well as the
resources. However, after several
meetings with Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), AIA had decided to merge the two
entities and return one of the licenses to BNM for their further action to
offer to new investor. In the process of
integrating the two takaful entities, four senior management including CEO of
IPTEB have been terminated and it is expected similar casualties may happen to
other levels in the near future. It is
interesting to note that the four senior management terminated had a total
relevant working experience of close to 100 years. Whilst the regulator and
industry had identified shortage of talent as one of critical success factors
for takaful industry, it is amazing to note that talents with about 100 years
of relevant working experience can easily be laid off.
Takaful Ehsan was established on 11 March 2011, obtained takaful
license from BNM on 1 April 2011 and officially launched the operation and
business on 5 April 2011. It embarked on
a multi-distribution channel strategy namely agency, bancatakaful and employees
benefit (EB) or corporate business.
Among several achievements, Takaful Ehsan had successfully introduced a
full-fledged e-submission or iPOS since it launched it’s business thus making
it the first among takaful companies to embark on full-fledged iPOS. With the facility, customer or intermediary
can easily submit cases via online and can print the letter of approval on the
spot within 1-2 minutes upon successful online underwriting using smart
underwriting. Takaful Ehsan had also
received tremendous acceptance on it’s EB business in view of stability of the
system.
