Eastspring Investments has appointed Chan San San chief partnership officer, moving the chief executive of Prudential's Singapore insurance business across to the group's asset management arm. The appointment was announced on 24 September 2026 and took effect at the end of that month.
Chan led Prudential Assurance Company Singapore for two years. She joined that business after around two decades at Citi, latterly as a managing director and global market manager in its private bank, covering ultra high net worth clients across Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. She is a chartered financial analyst and holds an accountancy degree from Nanyang Technological University, and serves as deputy president of the Life Insurance Association of Singapore.
The role she takes up is the commercial joint between the two halves of the group. Eastspring manages money for Prudential's insurance businesses across Asia and also sells to third party distributors, and the chief partnership officer owns the relationships through which those assets arrive. Appointing someone who has just run one of the largest of those insurance businesses puts a former internal client on the manager's side of the table.
That is a deliberate answer to a structural problem. Insurance linked assets are stable but low margin, and every Asian asset manager attached to an insurer is trying to grow the third party book without losing the captive one. The people who understand what an insurance chief executive actually needs from an asset manager are, for the most part, insurance chief executives.
Her move also leaves Prudential's Singapore business under interim leadership while a permanent successor is identified, which means the group has traded certainty in one subsidiary for capability in another.
She reports to Rajeev Mittal within the Eastspring leadership structure.
Chan spent around two decades at Citi before moving to Prudential, latterly as a managing director in its private bank covering ultra high net worth clients across three South East Asian markets. That background is relevant to the new role in a way her insurance tenure alone would not be, because the third party distribution Eastspring is trying to grow runs substantially through private banks and wealth platforms rather than through retail brokers.
The chief partnership officer title has become more common across Asian asset managers attached to insurers, and it generally denotes the same thing: a single owner for both the internal insurance mandate and the external distribution book, on the view that the two were previously being managed by people with different incentives.
Her move leaves Prudential's Singapore insurance business under interim leadership while a permanent chief executive is identified. For a group that has spent recent years simplifying towards Asia and Africa, moving a country chief executive into a group function rather than out of the organisation is the kind of internal transfer that suggests the asset management arm is being given more weight, not less.
Eastspring manages assets on behalf of Prudential's insurance operations across the region in addition to its third party business.
