The founder of Bowtie Life Insurance explains his mission to shake up how people claim their medical care
In the What Matters To Me series, a Generation T honouree describes what they do, why they do it, and why it matters.
It was only when Fred Ngan needed heart surgery that he realised the medical insurance provided by his major Hong Kong accounting firm wasn’t enough. “People don’t look at their plans until something happens,” Fred Ngan says. “I had to line up at a busy public hospital [to get my surgery] because the coverage I had wasn’t sufficient.”
Ngan credits that experience as one of the reasons he began to question the ways of traditional insurance. “The [insurance] industry is quite backward,” he says. “You can’t find any product information online, you don’t know the premiums and it’s just not very transparent. There’s just so much paperwork and you have to wait days or weeks before you even find out if you’re covered or not.” Ngan realised he had found an unanswered need in the industry, and he had some big ideas on how he could revolutionise the outdated space, starting with making the process easier. In 2018, Hong Kong’s first virtual insurer, Bowtie Life Insurance, went online.
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The coronavirus and subsequent lockdowns have created behavioural change across the globe, where we are moving increasingly online for both necessity and convenience— like Uber and Deliveroo. That’s what we aim to create with our virtual insurance company. Changing habits can be hard but online services like ours are so convenient that they can become a permanent change. We know it will take us some time to educate people on this new style of insurance, but we believe it’ll be adopted quickly.