Sunday, May 04, 2008

Prefer higher annual bonus

POSTED IN MY BLOG
Mr Tan,

My family, relatives & I bought many policies of NTUC Income. I am disppointed by the change in bonus structure too

We bought policies from NTUC Income because it is a co-operative hence it will be policyholder-focus insead of shareholder-focus. It is also a low-cost operator. All these means that it can introduce good value products, and return more benefits to policyholders.

Moreover, insurance companies are investing in the same kind of assets, largely in bonds, due to regulatory requirements. Hence I believe their investment performance should be largely the same over in the long term. Hence low-cost and policyholder-centric factors are real differentiators to higher higher bonus payouts.

I read that the new bonus structure is more in line with industry practice. It is also industry practice to cut terminal bonus drastically during major financial crisis in the past such as SARS, 911, Asia Financial Crisis, to remain their financial solvency. I have been investing directly in the equity market for the past 10 years, so I am quite certain major financial crisis will occur again in future. Hence I favour higher annual bonus declaration than a significantly higher but uncertain terminal bonus.

I applaud and support your effort to advocate NTUC Income to reverse their position on this matter.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

NTUC is specail; it is a cooperative; it is different from the rest. We have many advantages like no share holders but policyholders , there is no need to set aside 10% of the profit for distribution to shareholders. Cooperatives after less all expenses the remaining can be distributed to POLICYHOLDERS. In the past expenses made of only 2%, the other 98% was distributed.We have an advantage of 10%. In other words we have more to distribute.
If we retain the 10%, we can still distribute high annual bonus.
On top of this we have 20% saving on profit on corporate tax. This too serves as advantage over the other company. Why talk of insolvency and smoothing when ntuc has a lot of spares.Something is wrong somewhere.Unless expenses have gone up. Where? Pay very high salary to senior managers. Have gold tap, gold toilet rollholder?
Remember NTUC was started to provide affordable insurance to the man in the street; to give low premiun, high protection and good return.What has happened to these cooperative values? This was the mission. It is not the mission TO BE THE #1 INSURER AT ALL COST.
The mission is to make sure all the men in the street are insured adequately and not to be saddled with high commission whole life products. To provide insurance at affordable premium and with decent return on investment.And not with rotten products like revosave and vivolife to enrich the agents at the expense of the customers and to make NTUC #1.

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Tan Kin Lian said...

I am sorry to have to delete the various comments in this blog. They are too personal.

I wish to thank ex-employee from revealing the wastefulness and high expenses. But, I guess it has to be done in another forum (so as to avoid misunderstanding that I was behind this "bitterness".

Also, it will be nice if the comments are identified to specific names, so that they are more credible.

I welcome private comments to be sent to me, so that I can edit them, and post the facts which can be substantiated.

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