Chairman and CEO Back Jong Kook

South Korea's Hanwha Life is one of the seven biggest life insurers in Viet Nam after being in the country for more than seven years. Viet Nam News asks chairman and CEO Back Jong Kook about the company's strategy in Viet Nam and how the market features in its plans.

Where does the Vietnamese market figure in the company's general development strategy? Why?

Viet Nam has been targeted as a key market for Hanwha Corp in Southeast Asia. First of all, it is a highly potential market with plenty of opportunities for growth of 6 per cent.

Furthermore, the life insurance industry always seems to be directly proportional to a country's development. Insurance firms tend to grow fast when the economy develops strongly. In 2015 the insurance market in Viet Nam achieved the highest rate of revenue growth in five years, with potential for even further progress in the following years.

Your company targets becoming the leading insurer in terms of quality by 2017 and one of the five biggest by 2020. How do you plan to achieve what seem to be tough targets?

Hanwha Life is now among the top seven in the life insurance market and one of the largest in terms of registered capital, and we will keep working hard to achieve the primary goals that we set. Our strategy is to concentrate on creating a solid business platform built on four key underlying elements - human resources development, system development, product development and service quality improvement.

We now have a financial consultancy team of more than 13,000 people, including nearly 1,000 leaders and over 1,100 star agents, with more than 1,000 more coming in every month regularly.

We have nearly 100,000 clients. The current network of customer service centres that the company maintains, with 62 outlets nationwide after just seven years, speaks for the strong efforts to expand rapidly that Hanwha Life Vietnam put in.

On top of that, we are also backed by our experienced holding corporation, Hanwha, one of the top 10 conglomerates in Korea and top 500 global corporation. I'm aware that to make Hanwha Life Vietnam among the top five insurance firms by 2020 is an ambitious and challenging goal. For the moment we will focus on building a financially sound, sustainable and engaging place to work for our employees, and not too much on ranking.

What are the advantages and disadvantages for an Asian life insurer in Viet Nam?

Personally, I believe that an Asian life insurance firm has no disadvantages compared to insurers coming from other continents when it wants to do business in Viet Nam. Just the opposite. Understanding and cultural commonality will be the very strengths that may boost Hanwha Life to even a faster pace of growth in this part of the world.

The culture of Viet Nam and Korea share some similarity in terms of taking the family seriously and raising and educating children. It is this very similarity that drives us in our efforts to design the right products. For example, educational products, endowment products and pension products will always be focused on and developed by Hanwha Life. While these may not be ‘explosive' products that bring good returns like existing universal life product offerings, 20 years from now, when a large part of the population gets older, these products ‘for the future' will come in very handy and useful for the provident Vietnamese.

Human resources play an important role in companies achieving their business strategies. In Viet Nam, however, human resources have fallen short of meeting the life insurance industry's needs. How has your company coped with the problem?

I can see that while the insurance industry has had only about 20 years of development in Viet Nam, too many insurance firms have been here. One or two new players enter the market every year, while the manpower is not growing fast enough to keep up with market development, and as a result, movement of employees between the companies is unavoidable. That's why we have emphasised and prioritised education and training to offer employees as many opportunities as possible to upgrade their capacity and skills to take on more responsibilities.

At Hanwha Life Vietnam, we believe people are the most valuable assets, which is also in line with the core values and corporate culture of our parent company.

Thus, we concentrate on incentives and compensation for the staff and agents, as well as training opportunities, both within the country and abroad. Importantly, what we do is provide a comfortable, flexible work environment, and wide open career development opportunities for potential talent.

With 27 years' experience in major markets, can you tell us how to rapidly develop human resources in the Vietnamese insurance industry? What should the Government do to make Vietnamese human resources more competitive, especially with the country becoming a member of the ASEAN Economic Community which almost has free movement of labour?

I do appreciate the competence of Vietnamese insurance professionals. At Hanwha Life Vietnam, most of our senior management staff are experienced and highly skilled Vietnamese. In the long run we will also be looking out for a Vietnamese CEO. In future Hanwha Life will be a Vietnamese company run by locals.

It is somewhat unfortunate that insurance training in Viet Nam mostly provides only basic knowledge and lacks more specialised life insurance training.

In Korea, there are many specialised centres for insurance, finance, credit and actuarial training. These centres are run by the insurance association and finance and credit association. I believe that such a model may become useful for the insurance industry in Viet Nam in future as it tries to resolve the short-staffing problem as well and enhance the competitiveness of the insurance workforce in the economic integration process.

What are your company's plans at a time when Viet Nam is strongly integrating with the world economy?

We highly appreciate Viet Nam's open-door policy. Since the country is now a major market for Hanwha Corp, apart from life insurance, we are also very interested in other businesses with high growth potential like finance, office leasing, real estate and others. Moreover, we have an even more ambitious goal – to enter more Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. Under our strategy, Vietnam will be a key market in Southeast Asia, and from here we will move further towards other regional markets. — VNS