Uphold the cooperative values

Hi Mr. Tan,

My wife and I have got a living policy each with NTUC Income during your tenure as CEO. I have great admiration for you as a CEO because you have come across to me as the dying breed of CEOs who do not aim for Income to keep breaking new frontiers but rather give more consideration to your clients and members.

The moment I heard you are stepping down, I told my wife our policy returns will suffer as the next CEO will try all means to increase profits. Now I am proven right - the new structure is a change to the policyholders' disfavour. We have to sacrifice one per cent per annum to gamble on promised return scenarios amid greater uncertainties and the present investment experts never disclose how they will ensure the existing policy holders will not be worst off.

I support you strongly to ask for old structure as a choice for existing policy holders - otherwise the investment chief must disclose how the policy holders will not be worst off with the new structure not just for the next few years but for the length of the policy life, stating clearly all assumptions objectively.

The greatest disadvantage is to let so high weightage on the surrender year or the death year to decide all the returns of the policy. This is like a lottery and it is completely unfair to those who do not want to gamble! I am too aware that privatisation will only incur initial few years of savings in the case of clean and efficient government but will eventually become a heavy burden for lower middle income earners and below.

If even a 2.13% return cannot be guaranteed for such a long period of investment horizon, I don't know what are they doing. Very sad that even insurance companies are joining the banks in paying less than peanuts as interest.

The fear that new CEO will take NTUC Income closer to the commercial insurance companies in achieving lesser and lesser returns because of higher expense ratio but less effective investment realisations is taking shape.

I am indeed very sad and disappointed that Mr Lim Boon Heng and Mr Yao who also represent the government support the NTUC Income case. Please do not be disheartened by the less than expected response from the policy holders because many do not understand the implications of the new structure - some even may be unaware of the change. I do not know how many policyholders are affected too.

That day I was trying to give you my signature but as I was not tech savy, I failed. Surely I am not the only one and there are still many uncles and aunties who are not very familiar with internet technology.

Mr Tan, I at one time felt that NTUC Fairprice also would be going down to be another Cold Storage, until the rising economic problems facing the mainstream of Singapore saves it. I sincerely hope you could lead us to prevent NTUC Income to become like just another AIA, Prudential, etc to show that NTUC Income has arrived. NTUC Income should distinguish itself from the rest of the insurers by guaranteeing that there will always be a space for a constant consideration to be given to the policyholders in the temptation of 'commercial pyrotechnics'.

Best Regards,
HT

REPLY
Thank you for your letter. I hope that the new CEO and board will continue to uphold the cooperative values and achieve better results to give better value to the policyholders. Give them some time.