How banks and insurers are misreading customer needs

They create lego-like customisable products, but it's the agents stacking the blocks.

Financial services seeking to provide more personalised services to customers should consistently partner with individual customers to engage them in their life cycle, according to banking and insurance experts.

Many financial service providers— particularly insurers— believe that the ultimate product is a building block, where customers have a base that they can add on as their needs grow. But the experience of how Filipinos avail an insurance policy does not match this product.

“Has anyone ever built a product for themselves when buying insurance?” Jose Eduardo Ang, chief product & innovation officer at Insular Life, asked attendees of the Manila leg of the Asian Banking & Finance and Insurance Asia Summit 2026.

Most are guided by a distributor or agent telling them which policies to avail, Ang said in a panel moderated by Durjoy Patranabish, vice president and head of global business at Tiger Analytics.

“Growing up, I imagine that those who have policies here were offered a product that they thought they needed,” he said. For example, families may have been sold a product with the promise that they need it to safeguard their family.

The Philippine insurance industry faces two issues that keeps penetration low even now, according to Singlife CEO Lester Cruz: insurers don’t know what customers need, and customers don’t know what they want.

“One of the biggest challenges of financial services providers is that we have products that are sold to customers which are intangible– cannot feel, cannot touch,” Cruz said.

Personalisation and financial literacy may emerge from engaging with Filipinos from when they are young, said Francis Chiu, first vice president and head of consumer banking applications at BDO Unibank.

Chiu remembered how, years ago, two banks allowed 14-15 year olds to open bank accounts with their own credit cards. 

Earlier than that, he recalled a bank that featured cartoon characters in  its products, which he said sparked his interest in financial services as a young boy.

“That became a cycle, an errand for me. After school I’ll go to the bank, then I’ll drop the 100 pesos that I saved for that week,” Chiu recalled.

For Cruz, the answer is in providing an experience.

“For us to be able to really appeal to the customers to consider not just Singlife but insurance itself, [it] is by providing them an experience,” Chiu said.