Raymond Cheung
Chartered Actuary · CRO · Board Adviser · Singapore
Younger customers are not simply less loyal, they hold fundamentally different expectations about value, digital experience and social purpose. The organisations that understand this early will carry a structural advantage.
What younger generations expect from insurance in Singapore and Southeast Asia is fundamentally different from what the industry built over the past century, and the organisations still treating digital as a distribution upgrade rather than a product redesign question are already behind. When I led the digital insurance programme at Grab across eight ASEAN markets, we were integrating insurance into a platform that customers used multiple times a day, which forced a genuine rethink of what insurance is for, not just how it is sold. The embedded insurance opportunity in ASEAN is growing fast, driven by a mobile-first, platform-dependent demographic that expects every financial service to be personalised, contextually relevant, and present throughout the relationship rather than invisible until a claim. Singapore insurers serious about this market need to address product design and data capability, not just distribution partnerships.
This is not simply a distribution problem. It is not solved by building a better app or reducing the number of clicks in a purchase journey, though both of those things matter. It is a fundamental question about what insurance is for, what value it delivers, how it relates to the rest of someone's financial and digital life, and what the organisation behind it stands for.
The expectation gap
Traditional insurance propositions are built around a transaction: you pay a premium, something bad happens, you make a claim. The value is largely invisible until the moment of loss. For a generation that expects services to be useful, personalised and engaged on a near-daily basis, because their bank, their food delivery, their transport app all operate that way,a product that disappears for eleven months and reappears only when something goes wrong is genuinely strange.
At Grab, we were integrating insurance into a daily-use platform. Customers were interacting with the Grab app multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. That context forced us to think about how insurance fits into an ongoing relationship rather than an annual transaction. It is a very different design problem.
“The question is not how to sell insurance to a younger customer. It is what insurance should be for a customer who has grown up in a world where every service is digital, personalised and present.”
Three things that actually matter
From what I observed across ASEAN markets, three things consistently differentiated experiences that resonated from those that did not.
- Transparency about value. What am I actually covered for? What will happen if I claim? What am I paying for? The generation that grew up comparing products online will not accept opacity in a financial product.
- Relevance and context. Coverage that adapts to circumstance, trip-based motor cover, on-demand health products, micro-insurance tied to specific activities,fits a life that does not conform to annual policy cycles.
- Social purpose alignment. This one surprised some incumbents. A meaningful proportion of younger customers care about what the organisation behind the product does and stands for, not superficially, but substantively. Greenwashing is noticed.
The distribution shift
Insurance has always been sold through relationships, agents, brokers, bancassurance partnerships. Those channels are not going away. But the role of embedded distribution,insurance offered at the point of relevance within a platform, app or service the customer is already using, is growing fast, and it changes the economics and the dynamics of the product fundamentally.
When a customer buys trip insurance while booking a ride, they are not in an insurance-buying mindset. The product has to be simple enough to work in that moment, valuable enough to feel worth it, and trusted enough that the brand behind it does not create friction. That is a different product design challenge from a traditional policy.
What incumbents should do
The organisations that will win in this market over the next decade are those that are genuinely rethinking product design, not just distribution. That means shorter-term products with clear, understandable coverage. It means using data to personalise risk assessment and pricing in ways that feel fair rather than opaque. It means building relationships during the policy period, not just at renewal.
It also means being honest about what you cannot do well as a traditional insurer, and where partnership, with platforms, with fintechs, with ecosystem players,creates more value than going alone. The organisations I have seen struggle most are those that are digitising their existing product and distribution model rather than rethinking it.
Common Questions
What do younger customers expect from insurance in Singapore and Southeast Asia?
Younger customers in Singapore and Southeast Asia expect insurance to behave like the other digital services they use daily, personalised, transparent, and present throughout the relationship rather than invisible until a claim. They want to understand clearly what they are covered for, they expect coverage to adapt to their circumstances, and a meaningful segment cares about the values and social purpose of the organisations they buy from. The traditional annual-renewal model, designed around physical distribution and paper documentation, does not fit how this demographic engages with financial services.
How is embedded insurance changing the Singapore and ASEAN insurance market?
Embedded insurance, coverage offered at the point of relevance within a platform or service the customer already uses, is growing rapidly across ASEAN because it solves the distribution and engagement problem that has held back insurance penetration in the region. When insurance is integrated into a ride-hailing app, an e-commerce checkout or a digital banking flow, the customer does not need to be in an insurance-buying mindset. The coverage is contextually relevant, the decision is low-friction, and the brand trust transfers from the platform. For Singapore insurance boards, the strategic question is whether to build embedded propositions directly, partner with platforms, or risk being disintermediated by those that do.
What should Singapore insurance boards do to adapt to digital-first customer expectations?
Singapore insurance boards should ask management three questions: How much of our current product design was built for a digital-first customer rather than a traditional distribution channel? Where are our embedded distribution partnerships and what proportion of new business do they represent? And what does our lapse and engagement data tell us about whether customers find value in our products during the policy period rather than only at claims? The boards that get ahead of this shift are investing in product simplification, data capability and platform partnerships, not simply digitising legacy policy administration.
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About the author
Raymond Cheung is a Chartered Actuary, C-suite executive and board adviser with more than 20 years of experience across Asia in risk management, insurance, ESG and corporate governance. He is the CEO of CER Consultancy and an accredited trainer at SMU Academy and the Singapore College of Insurance.