Life insurer Pru Life UK formed a partnership with CIMB Bank Philippines to deliver the commitment of not only promoting public awareness on health and financial literacy but also making digital financial products and services more accessible to Filipinos through the combined strength of Pru Life UK’s health and wealth platform called Pulse, and CIMB’s digital banking app.
“This is our very first digital bancassurance partnership in our 25 years of operations in the Philippines. It marks the auspicious start of a long-term partnership to further extend our reach to more Filipinos across the country. Over the next five years, we aim to provide more customers with accessible and portable customer-centric and innovative solutions,” said Pru Life UK’s president and chief executive officer Eng Teng Wong.
Under the partnership, CIMB products will be made available on Pulse by Prudential, an all-in-one app powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) that offers holistic health and wealth management solutions to its members. These products include CIMB Savings and its newly-launched REVI Credit – an on-demand digital credit line which also functions as a Buy Now Pay Later product – by enabling both of these innovative solutions to be seamlessly available on the Pulse mobile app.
Pru Life UK, in turn, will provide CIMB’s customers with easy access to life insurance products through the Bank’s app and health and wealth offerings on its Pulse app. These include features such as an AI-powered symptom checker and health assessment tool.
Pru Life UK and CIMB Bank Philippines started discussions on the partnership about four months ago with the vision to make insurance simpler and more accessible to all Filipinos.
“At Prudential, we have a very clear purpose and that is to help more people to get the most out of life and we do this by making healthcare more portable and accessible, and to protect people’s wealth, helping them to grow, said Wilf Blackburn, regional chief executive officer of Insurance Growth Markets at Prudential, adding that, “we can extend our purpose to more people in the Philippines by providing greater access to affordable financial solutions through technology.”
CIMB Bank Philippines chief executive officer Vijay Manoharan notes that in CIMB, driving financial inclusion is their purpose, and they believe that there are four aspects in enabling access to financial inclusion for all Filipinos. These include access to savings, access to credit, access to insurance, and access to remittance services. “All four are vital in enabling a holistic financial inclusion proposition especially for those who are underserved and underbanked,” he said.
Manoharan also said that in line with their innovative embedded banking strategy which they have employed in the Philippines in the past three years, they are now working towards completing the financial inclusion basket of propositions to becoming an integral part of consumers’ daily lives.
The partnership between CIMB and Pru Life UK will strengthen Prudential’s distribution network and help reach out to more people in the country through technology. It provides CIMB’s growing customer base with easy access to Prudential’s market-leading products and at the same time, Pulse users will benefit from having access to an expanded suite of wealth solutions.
“We believe there is a significant opportunity for Prudential to grow in the Philippines and we look forward to working closely with CIMB to develop more innovative solutions for the digitally-savvy population in the Philippines and to accelerate financial inclusion,” said Blackburn.
