QUESTION NO 562

NOTICE PAPER 305 OF 2021

FOR WRITTEN ANSWER

Date: For Parliament Sitting on 5 April 2021

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament

Mr Patrick Tay Teck Guan, MP, Pioneer SMC

Question:

To ask the Prime Minister for each of the years from 2010 to 2020 (a) how many people in the labour force are working as insurance agents; and (b) what is the breakdown for such persons in terms of full-time employment, part-time employment, educational qualification, age, gender and nationality.

Answer by Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Senior Minister and Minister in charge of MAS:

1.      The number of insurance agents – comprising life, general, and compositeAgents who are both life and general insurance agents. – rose in the first half of the last decade, but has remained stable at around 19,000 since 2015. The breakdown by age, gender, and nationality over time, are available only for life and composite insurance agents. The majority of agents are below 40 years old. The gender balance is very even. Singapore Citizens make up about 90% of the agency force, with Permanent Residents making up most of the rest; the number of foreigners remains small at about 350.

2.      The requested statistics for insurance agents are set out in the tables below.

Table 1: Number of life, general and composite insurance agents

3.      The latest statistics on general and composite insurance agents by age and gender is set out belowThe statistics in Tables 4 and 5 comprise of general insurance agents that are also life insurance agents. GIA is not able to generate statistics solely for general insurance agents due to system constraints..

Table 4: Number of general and composite insurance agents by age

Table 5: Number of general and composite insurance agents by gender

4.      The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the General Insurance Association of Singapore (GIA) do not make a distinction between full-time or part-time insurance agents and do not collect information on academic qualifications. Life insurance agents must minimally have a GCE “A” level certificate or an International Baccalaureate Diploma qualification or a diploma awarded by a polytechnic in Singapore, or equivalent qualifications. General insurance agents are required to have at least 3 GCE “O” Level passes or equivalent. Life insurance agents have higher minimum academic qualification requirements than general insurance agents as life insurance products are typically more complex in nature.

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