FWD Group, backed by billionaire Richard Li, has revived talks about a potential acquisition of the life insurance operations of Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank Pcl after a two-year hiatus. Siam Commercial reached a preliminary pact with FWD on a potential life-insurance partnership, the lender said in a recent Bangkok exchange...
Zurich Australia has teamed up with Fusion Specialty Insurance, a business unit of POP Insurance, to strengthen its capacity in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) space in Australian insurance sector. Pursuant to the terms of the underwriting agency partnership agreement, Zurich Australia will grant its underwriting authority to Fusion to...
Malaysia’s Employees Provident Fund (EPF), the country’s largest pension fund, expects uncertainty to be the new norm in 2019 and says it will remain prudent with investments. According to EPF chief executive officer Alizakri Alias, this will be a year where “uncertainty will be the new certainty”. “Last year, there...
Japan’s Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company (Dai-ichi Life) has committed JPY1 billion (USD9.03 million) to a venture capital fund investing in renewable energy, marking the insurer’s tenth domestic impact investment in the past 17 months. Impact investing refers to investments in enterprises that produce social and environmental benefits, in addition to...
Ping An has partnered with Ethereum (ETH)-based decentralised artificial intelligence (AI) start-up SingularityNET. In a press release announced by SingularityNET, the collaboration will at first focus on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Computer Vision (CV) and model training. SingularityNET notes that the scope of the partnership is expected to expand to...
The State Council General Office has issued a document on the combination of funds and management resources for maternity insurance and basic medical insurance in a bid to improve management efficiency and reduce operation costs. The move is also aimed at establishing an institutional system that adapts to China’s economic...
The Indonesian Trade Ministry has delayed the implementation of its regulation that requires coal and palm oil exporters to obtain local insurance cover to May 31, 2019. The latest postponement is the third for the regulation. It was first issued in October 2017, and later slated to come into effect...
The India government’s plan for a merger of the largest non-life entities is yet to see light, with the Department of Financial Services (DFS) writing to recommend not proceeding with plan in haste and instead examine the plan further. The fresh impediment has already removed the merger plan from this...
The Insurance Regulatory Development Authority of India recently set up a committee to identify a Domestic Systematically Important Insurer (D-SII) and institute an enhanced regulatory framework for such organisations. The Life Insurance Corporation (SII) will most likely fall in this category. However, insurance sector officials are not sure whether any...
Pak-Qatar Family Takaful recently signed an agreement with Ensur (a project management and consulting company in Brussels, Belgium), which will enable the company to provide advisory services to the insurance consultant. Ensur is studying the opportunity to introduce Takaful insurance to Belgium and surrounding countries, and wants to get an...
