Assistant Vice President, Business Assurance Unit

Singlife is a leading homegrown financial services company, offering consumers a better way to financial freedom. Through innovative, technology-enabled solutions and a wide range of products and services, Singlife provides consumers control over their financial wellbeing at every stage of their lives.

In addition to a comprehensive suite of insurance plans, employee benefits, partnerships with financial adviser channels and bancassurance, Singlife offers investment and advisory solutions through its GROW with Singlife platform. It also offers the Singlife Account, a mobile-first insurance savings plan.

Singlife is the exclusive insurance provider for the Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Home Affairs and Public Officers Group Insurance Scheme. Singlife is also an official signatory of the United Nations Principles for Sustainable Insurance and the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment, affirming its commitment to finding a better way to sustainability.

The merger of Aviva Singapore and Singlife was announced in September 2020 and created one of the largest homegrown financial services companies in Singapore in a deal valued at S$3.2 billion. It was the largest insurance deal in Singapore at the time.

Singlife was subsequently acquired by Sumitomo Life in March 2024, one of Japan’s leading life insurers, which valued Singlife at S$4.6 billion, making the transaction one of the largest insurance deals in Southeast Asia.

Key Appointments:

• Conduct of pre-transaction checks of submitted sales by Singlife Financial Advisers sales force with assessment criteria.
• Monitor performance trend of sales force in quality of documentation and prepare reports for senior management and Board.
• This role is an independent sales audit role to ensure that SFA upholds quality of business commitments to the regulators.
• Secondary support function to support other responsibilities under Business Excellence office eg. Product Management, Management of Non-Market Conduct Complaints etc.

Key Responsibilities:

• Obtain daily cases from Propel Operations Teams and identify sampling to be reviewed based on set criteria.
• Conduct pre-transaction documentation checks (PTC) on the submitted cases and identify documentation errors, inconsistencies in fact find and insurer application documents. These include checking for consistency and completeness of fact find, suitability of product recommended, adequate basis of recommendation; disclosure and explanation to customers on product features, risk and limitations, accurate documentation of insurer/investment applications etc.
• Handle return of cases with documentation errors and liaising with sales force to ensure adequate correction and remediation.
• Manage allocation of cases for customer surveys and liaise with IT support for surveys and Customer Assurance Unit (CAU) on handling call backs.
• Compute and monitor PTC results and maintain statistics of the results for the purpose of regular reporting and assessment of effectiveness of PTC and impact on competency of sales force.
• Conduct coaching to sales reps and TLs to remediate poor PTC results to improve sales advisory competency and consistency.
• Escalate material breaches of advisory standards to risk and compliance for further investigation and remediation.
• Conduct assessment and approval of corrected proposals before they can proceed to insurer/investment platforms. Return cases found to be inadequately corrected and ensure full and proper correction is completed by the sales reps before allowing the cases to proceed.
• Conduct regular training and briefing to the sales force on PTC process, observations and trends to provide ongoing guidance on best practices in sales advisory.
• Collaborate with other stakeholders (Training& Competency, BD, Compliance, BSC Team) to update on sales advisory practices and concerns to ensure that sales standards are upheld as laid out in the SFA Sales and T&C manuals.
• Ensure compliance with all applicable laws and regulations relating to the above functional activities.
• Secondary functions (Product Management) – handle all administration for Product Management and SFA Product Committee; directing and coordinating with Propel Product Management Team to ensure delivery of SLA on Product Management. Serve as liaison with SFA’s Product Providers, overseeing all onboarding processes for new providers, ongoing due diligence processes for existing providers, coordination of new product launches, replacement and enhancements etc.
• Secondary Function (Management of Non-Market Conduct Investigations) – handle independent investigation of all customer complaints that are not non-market conduct related eg servicing complaints etc. This includes preparation of reports, notifications to involved parties and issuing of remediation actions, if any.

Key Decisions within the Role:

• Ensure that rectifications to documentation are properly completed and signed off by customers and that these are completed in a timely manner. Only approved cases are allowed to proceed.
• Escalate cases of concern to Compliance Team and SVP Risk and Compliance for further assessment and action.
• Ensure that all Product Management assignments are completed in timely manner and new products are launched on time and due diligences completed by Propel Product Management team meet SLA requirements. Serve as Secretary for the SFA Product Committee and maintain PC TOR, Product Due Diligence and Product Provider Due Diligence TOR/SOPs.

Requirements: Experience

• Relevant professional qualifications or extensive experiences in a key role.
• In depth understanding of the risk and governance drivers of insurance/financial advisory industry.
• In depth knowledge and understanding of regulations/legislation that govern the financial advisory/insurance industry.
• Sales experience in a financial advisory/insurance role.
• Compliance experience in Regulatory Assurance role handling BSC or Sales Quality.

Education

• Degree/Diploma holder in any discipline, preferably with compliance and professional industry experience.

Key Stakeholders: External:

• External meetings that cover industry practices and regulatory concerns such as Consultation Papers will be applicable to the Business Assurance Team. External seminars that seek to improve industry practices for sales advisory and quality of sales would also be applicable.
• Customers, regulators, professional bodies, consultants etc

Internal:

• Participate and contribute to key Singlife FA/Singlife Group company projects and initiatives that provide peer-to-peer interaction and exposure to strategic directions from higher level staff.
• Collaboration with other staff/teams to achieve Singlife FA/Singlife Group ACE-IT values and broad objectives.

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