Prudential plc has appointed Naveed Irshad as regional chief executive for Indonesia, the Philippines and Africa, bringing a long serving Manulife executive into the group executive committee of the London and Hong Kong listed insurer.
The company announced the appointment from Hong Kong. Irshad takes up the role in the last week of this month, will be based in Hong Kong and reports to the group chief executive Anil Wadhwani. Alongside the regional mandate he takes enterprise wide responsibility for health and product across the group.
He spent much of his career at Manulife. He was president and chief executive of Manulife Canada, and earlier president and chief executive of Manulife Singapore, and ran the group global inforce management function and its North American legacy business. He held senior roles at the reinsurer RGA before that, and has chaired the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association and sat on the board of the Global Risk Institute.
The shape of the mandate is the interesting part. Grouping Indonesia, the Philippines and Africa under one regional chief executive puts together three markets with low insurance penetration, young populations and expanding bank distribution, and separates them from the mature Asian markets where Prudential competes on product sophistication rather than on reach. It is a growth portfolio managed as a growth portfolio.
Adding health and product to the same job is the second signal. Prudential has been explicit that health is where it expects margin to come from as traditional savings products face competition from asset managers and banks, and health underwriting is harder to replicate than savings distribution. Putting the group product agenda in the hands of an executive who also carries a regional profit and loss is a way of making sure the product strategy is tested against markets rather than designed centrally.
It is also a specific answer to Prudential's inforce problem. An insurer's back book of existing policies is where value either compounds or leaks, and Irshad ran exactly that function at Manulife, including its North American legacy business, which is among the most studied inforce management exercises in the industry. That is an unusual skill to recruit into a growth region, and it suggests the group wants the new business written in these markets to be managed with the discipline normally reserved for closed blocks.
Prudential reports its next set of results to the London and Hong Kong markets in the normal course.
