Great Eastern goes on the high-net-worth offensive, but don’t call it a pivot
Group CEO Greg Hingston believes the insurer can out-compete its multinational rivals
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[SINGAPORE] Sitting in Great Eastern’s swanky new Hewton Fair Suite – an exclusive space within the Great Eastern Centre designed for servicing high-net-worth clients – there is a distinct note of fresh coffee and quiet ambition in the room.
For 118 years, Great Eastern has been a reliable fixture for ordinary Singaporeans. It is the pioneer of the domestic insurance scene, covering everything from basic health to critical illness plans.
Now, the insurer has decided it is time to focus on the wealthy.
Since the current leadership took the reins about a year-and-a-half ago, the mandate from the top has been clear: grow and transform.
Today, that means leaning into the affluent segment by tapping into the ecosystem of parent company OCBC and its private banking arm, Bank of Singapore (BOS).
“The first 18 months have been very much focused on ‘How do we optimise the businesses that we have today and the assets that we have today?’” said Great Eastern’s group chief executive officer Greg Hingston. “Now we’re starting to look at where growth comes from beyond that.”
The power of proximity
One of the greatest thrusts behind Great Eastern’s wealth push is the physical advantage of being closely linked with its partners.
Wealthy individuals flying into Singapore for meetings have zero tolerance for waiting weeks to finalise a policy. Here, Great Eastern has turned physical proximity into a competitive moat.
In the Hewton Fair Suite – a stone’s throw away from OCBC and BOS – the firm partnered Raffles Medical Group to build an on-site medical suite. Operationally, this removes the friction that usually bogs down high-net-worth transactions.
“The great thing is proximity,” Hingston noted. “We can bring a client from the bank over here, they go into the medical centre in the morning, a medical report can be generated by lunchtime, and literally by the end of the day, they can be underwritten.”
In a slow industry, getting a tycoon underwritten before their flight home is a rare feat.
“No one else can do that in Singapore,” he said. “You can have your tea, go and do some shopping, and then before you leave, it is done... It’s a compelling part of the overall proposition.”
The strategy appears to be working. Great Eastern delivered a record full-year profit of S$1.2 billion for 2025, a 21 per cent bump driven by robust investment returns.
More telling is the deliberate shift in sales.
Total weighted new sales dropped 15 per cent, as the insurer made a strategic shift away from short-term single-premium products towards a more diversified range of longer-term product offerings.
The gamble paid off: New business embedded value – a crucial metric of future profit – shot up 19 per cent to S$739.7 million.
If 2025 was the proof of concept, the first quarter of 2026 shows momentum sticking.
Total weighted new sales rebounded, rising 16 per cent to S$401.9 million. Value creation pushed new business embedded value up 31 per cent to S$195.4 million, carried largely by Singapore.
Chasing the wealthy, carefully
But Great Eastern is careful to frame its high-net-worth push as an extension of its business. They have no intention of giving up on their core mass-market base.
“I want to make that really, really clear,” Hingston stressed. “We are 100 per cent focused on who we are as Great Eastern, and all of the services and the solutions that we provide for that group.”
“For the high-net-worth, we’ve created Great Eastern Private, which allows people to resonate with that in a different way – but that’s a completely new opportunity,” he added. “It’s not a pivot... We’re adding something on.”
This extension makes obvious commercial sense. A generational wealth transfer of roughly US$5.8 trillion across Asia-Pacific is underway, and affluent clients are obsessed with legacy planning.
While insurance is a highly effective tool for wealth transfer, it still represents a tiny share of overall assets managed for the ultra-rich.
To capture this money, Great Eastern formed a specialist hub of excellence, bundling 15 partners across domains such as legal, tax, charity and concierge services.
The ecosystem play
The other half of this strategy relies on a successful marriage between Great Eastern, OCBC and BOS.
For years, the bank-assurance cross-selling dream has been more talk than reality. Bancassurance partnerships frequently fail because banks view insurers as product vendors, while insurers view banks as sales pipes.
The way Hingston sees it, this dynamic has shifted for Great Eastern through OCBC’s newly empowered Wealth Management Committee, which forces the leadership of all three groups into the same room.
”There’s a lot of meetings I have to do – that’s the only downside,” he quipped. “But it’s needed.”
“It’s absolutely necessary because you’re coordinating across separate, different entities; there’s a degree of complexity, and it does need coordination.”
The Wealth Management Committee, Hingston said, ensures that the tone and direction from the top is consistent, and that this runs through to the execution and operationalisation of the joint strategies.
“It’s starting to pay dividends,” he added. “It’s actually demonstrating that there’s a lot more value that we can create.”
Pushing into South-east Asia
While Singapore remains the goose that lays the golden eggs, the domestic market is naturally capped. The serious growth multipliers lie across South-east Asia.
In Indonesia, OCBC Indonesia is currently buying HSBC’s retail wealth business, providing a ready-made distribution network.
“That will significantly add to the existing consumer business. That, for us, is a huge opportunity,” Hingston said.
Meanwhile, Great Eastern recently launched a Singapore dollar-denominated product in the Indonesian market. Offering the wealthy access to the stability of Singaporean assets through an OCBC branch is a sharp tactical move.
A similar strategy is unfolding in Malaysia. Amid rising medical costs, the company launched an integrated healthcare network called “The Great Journey”.
Crucially, Great Eastern also secured a licence in Labuan that will allow it to access the onshore high-net-worth market there.
The reality of ILPs
The push into wealth management inevitably raises the question of investment-linked policies (ILPs), which often draws regulatory heat due to complex fees and murky returns.
Hingston believes some of the problem might stem from mismatched expectations.
“It’s a product that is not for everybody, it’s got to meet specific needs,” he said. “We are focused on making sure the disclosures are clearer, and people understand exactly what it is that they’re getting into.”
But he is clear that clients should not treat insurance like a day-trading account. “If you’re trying to time the market, you will fail hopelessly,” he warned. “It’s about being invested over the longer term.”
The legacy play
Managing a 118-year-old company requires balancing a deep respect for history with the rough reality of modern markets. Yet, the ultimate goal remains distinctly human.
Asked about his legacy, the chief does not cite profit margins. Instead, he said: “I genuinely want to be number one for customer advocacy.”
“I want this organisation to genuinely be seen in the eyes of the consumer as being different and as genuinely making a difference to them,” he added.
He wants the brand to retain its local charm while fighting above its weight class. “I want people to be very proud of Great Eastern as a local champion,” Hingston said. “I want us to be able to out-compete any of the multinationals that exist.”
Turning a massive, traditional insurer into an agile wealth manager will require changing agent mindsets, forcing bankers to share client lists, and executing complex strategies across South-east Asia.
However, with a private bank at their disposal and the OCBC group’s focus on cooperation, Great Eastern holds a strong hand.
The pioneer of Singapore insurance has finally decided to sit at the high-roller table, and it seems prepared to play for keeps.
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