Etiqa to focus on raising awareness

By EUGENE MAHALINGAM
KUALA LUMPUR: Etiqa Takaful Bhd, the takaful arm of Mayban Fortis Holdings Bhd, wants to increase awareness on the importance of takaful life insurance in the country.

To do this, it would focus on training its agency staff, said chief executive officer Mohd Tarmidzi Ahmad Nordin.

“We want to increase the productivity of our staff and train them to inform people that we are not offering a product but a solution to their problems.

“At the end of the day, we need to remind people on the importance of takaful. With good agents, we can do this,” he told StarBiz recently.

He said the penetration rate for takaful life insurance in Malaysia was still very low as many people were unaware of its importance.

Mohd Tarmidzi

“The takaful segment currently comprises about 7% of the overall insurance industry. With better awareness, we can grow the segment.

“We would like the segment to be at the same level where conventional insurance is today,” Tarmidzi said, adding that the penetration rate for conventional insurance in Malaysia was 40% currently.

“A lot of people do not consider takaful important because it is something intangible,” he said, adding that people often took death for granted.

“Nobody wants to think about death. Until it happens to someone close to them, people always think that death is something that happens to other people.”

Tarmidzi noted that hiking fuel prices and inflationary fears would result in people being more cautious with their spending and less likely to consider an insurance policy.

“People should be more mindful about their spending habits. Everything is becoming expensive but income levels remain the same. A takaful policy is not expensive.”

He added that people who already had takaful should not cancel their policies if they felt maintaining the policy was becoming a financial burden.

Mayban Fortis is 70% owned by Malayan Banking Bhd and 30% owned by Fortis Insurance International NV, a leading European integrated financial services company.

According to Tarmidzi, Mayban Fortis has about 14,000 agents, 10,000 of whom were takaful agents.


(sumber: http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/6/24/business/21587963&sec=business)