Professor Shinichi of the Division of Banking and Finance, Nanyang Business School and Co-Director of the Insurance Risk and Finance Research Centre

Ms Cheng Min Hung, Chief Executive Officer of Global Asia Insurance Partnership

Distinguished guests, judges, mentors, and participants from across the region.

1 It is my pleasure to join you at the fourth GAIP Insurance Case Competition this evening.

2 This competition has come a long way. It began as a local event in 2023 and has now grown into a global competition, with more than 500 teams from nine jurisdictions taking part this year.

3 You come from different markets, with different social systems, different levels of insurance development, and different expectations of what insurance should do.

4 But throughout this competition, you have all been wrestling with the same deceptively simple question: How can we help people recognise the value of insurance and make an active and conscious decision to purchase it?

5 It is a difficult question because insurance has a rather unusual problem.
 
The value that is hard to see

6 We tend to celebrate industries that create things we can see and touch. Architects create skylines. Engineers build bridges. Technology companies create products that transform how we live and work.

7 Insurance is different. When it works well, a family rebuilds its home after a disaster. A patient gets the treatment she needs without exhausting a lifetime of savings. A small business reopens after a fire. Children continue their education, even after the death or disability of a parent.

8 Essentially, life goes on.

9 There is no monument to any of this. The achievement is that a misfortune does not become a catastrophe. A temporary setback does not permanently alter the course of someone’s life.

10 And therein lies the difficulty.

11 We see the insurance premium leaving our bank account today. But we do not see the financial hardship that it may prevent tomorrow.

12 Indeed, the best outcome for many policyholders is to pay for protection they never need to use.

13 That is not an easy proposition to sell.
 
Who ultimately pays

14 Insurance does not make losses disappear.

15 When a home is destroyed, a business is disrupted or a family loses its main source of income, the economic loss is real. Someone must bear it.

16 Without insurance, that may be a family drawing down its savings. It may be a business that is already struggling to stay afloat. It may be a community — or ultimately, the public purse.

17 Insurance changes who bears that loss when it happens.

18 It pools losses across people and across time, and shifts the risk from those who may be overwhelmed to institutions better able to absorb and manage it.

19 That is why the protection gap matters.

20 In Asia, natural catastrophes caused approximately US$65 billion in economic losses in 2025. Only US$5.2 billion (or around 8% of that) was insured.https://www.swissre.com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-dialogues/climate-and-natural-catastrophe-risk/natural-catastrophes-shaping-risk-landscapes/asia-natural-catastrophes-2025.html The rest did not disappear. Someone still had to pay.

21 So the protection gap is not simply a measure of how much insurance has not been sold. It is about who bears the loss when adversity strikes, and are they best placed to bear it?

Different markets, shared vulnerabilities

22 This is not only a problem for developing insurance markets. Even in mature markets like the US, UK and Australia, people can own insurance and still be under-protected.

23 Singapore is no exception. We have a mature insurance market and relatively high life insurance penetration. Yet significant mortality and critical-illness protection gaps remain.The Life Insurance Association Protection Gap Study, 2022.

24 The reasons people remain under-protected vary. Some underestimate the risk they face. Some find insurance hard to understand. Some have more immediate demands on their money. Others may simply not know whom to trust.

25 There is no single protection gap. So there cannot be a single solution.

The real challenge

26 That is why the challenge you have worked on is so important.

27 This is not just about selling more insurance. It requires us to ask:

• How do we make the value of insurance real and relevant to the risks people worry about at different stages of their lives?
• How do we give people enough information to make good decisions without overwhelming them?
• And how do we ensure that every interaction with insurance, from buying a policy to making a claim, strengthens rather than weakens trust?

28 These go beyond questions about product design. They are questions about communication, consumer behaviour, technology, distribution, public policy and ultimately, trust.

29 This understanding is reflected in the range of solutions you have proposed. Some teams focused on how insurance is explained. Some redesigned products and distribution around the needs of consumers. Others explored how technology, data and behavioural insights might help people act before protection becomes urgent. We saw teams experiment with AI, gamification and tokenisation.

30 The diversity of approaches is itself instructive. Awareness alone is not enough.

31 We can explain the value of insurance perfectly. But if products are unsuitable or unaffordable , awareness will not close the gap. We can make insurance incredibly easy to buy. But if people do not trust that their claims will be handled fairly, convenience will not close the gap. We can use behavioural insights to prompt people to act. But if nudges become pressure, we may achieve a sale today at the expense of trust tomorrow.
 
Building understanding and trust

32 The insurance industry cannot do this alone. Governments, regulators, industry bodies and educators have been working on closing the gap for many years.

33 Here in Singapore, initiatives such as MoneySense, industry education campaigns and the Basic Financial Planning Guide seek to help people better understand their financial and protection needs.

34 GAIP’s work takes an even broader perspective: looking beyond individual products to the resilience of societies as a whole. Through the ADB Institute–GAIP Capacity Building Programme for Risk Resilience, more than 200 policymakers and regulators across ASEAN+3 have gained the knowledge and tools to consider protection gaps in a more integrated manner.

35 But experience also teaches us some humility. There will be no single campaign, disclosure document, app or regulatory requirement that suddenly closes this gap. Understanding takes time. Trust has to be earned.

36 This competition matters because you have brought fresh eyes to a problem that the industry has been thinking about for a long time. You have challenged assumptions and drawn connections across disciplines, technologies and markets. You have turned those ideas into practical proposals.

37 Whatever the judges decide, what you’ve contributed here reaches beyond who takes home an award tonight.

Ultimately about hope

38 Insurance is often presented as a product built around fear.

• Fear of losing a home.
• Fear of illness.
• Fear of death.
• Fear that a business might fail.

39 But there is a more hopeful way to see it.

40 People do not insure their homes simply because they fear losing them. They do so because they believe life there will continue – even if disaster strikes. Parents seek protection not because they dwell on illness or death, but because they carry hopes for their children that they will not leave to chance. Entrepreneurs insure their businesses because they see a future worth fighting for.

41 Seen in that light, insurance is not a wager against misfortune. It is an affirmation of belief – in continuity, resilience and possibility.

42 And perhaps that is the thought to leave you with this evening.

43 You have spent this competition exploring how to help more people protect their future. Tonight, we celebrate where that thinking has taken you.

44 Thank you.

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