Tong Yang Life Sets Eyes on Pension Market
By Kim Jae-won
Staff Reporter
Tong Yang Life is not the biggest life insurer here but has been long regarded as on one of the most profitable and healthiest players thanks to its customer-oriented business practices and management philosophy.
After successfully weathering the global financial crisis, the company has set an ambitious vision to become one of Korea's leading life insurers and a global financial leader.
To that end, it first aims to join the league of Korea's leading firms in the field by 2012 by adopting a balanced growth strategy and finding opportunities in newly-emerging areas, such as the pension market.
Currently, three major companies ― Samsung Life, Kyobo Life, and Korea Life ― have dominated the local market, occupying about half of it, and Tong Yang has been a runner-up. However, it now hopes to leap forward to become one of the four big players within three years.
Tong Yang joined the Korea Exchange last October, becoming the first life insurer to be listed. Its total assets breached 10 trillion won last year, and are expected to reach 100 billion won in net profit for the 2009 fiscal year, which ends in March.
Balanced Growth
The firm plans to increase its market share through a strategy of balanced growth. It said that it will gear up to expand the size of its financial consulting (FC) channel, its main growth engine, while making more efforts to strengthen new avenues, such as bancassurance, direct channels and general agencies.
Equipped with industry-leading financial expertise and capabilities, the FC marketing sector provides customized consulting services to individuals and households. In the bancassurance area, a variety of its savings insurance and variable insurance products are hot sellers for high yields at nationwide bank windows.
Tong Yang's symbol is a guardian angel, which well illustrates its management philosophy of prioritizing customer satisfaction. It focuses on realizing values by offering client-oriented services and products.
In addition, the firm is seen as an industry leader when it comes to managing customer information. It acquired an ISO 27001, an international certificate for information protection from the British Standard Institution in November.
"The ISO 27001 proved that we meet international standard for information management," said Jung Cha-young, chief information officer of the firm. "We hope that our clients will trust us more than ever."
Tong Yang marked net profit of 74.9 billion won through the third quarter of the 2009 fiscal year, up 229.3 percent from the previous year and it is expected to report more than 100 billion won for this period.
Total assets also grew gradually. It breached 8 trillion won in 2007, and recorded more than 9.1 trillion won a year later. As of September 2009, it reached 10 trillion won.
Tong Yang's solvency margin ratio, a barometer of the financial soundness of insurance firms, has also increased. It was 180 percent two years ago, but it rose to 256 percent in November, much higher than the international standard of 200 percent.