Insurance Buying in Singapore: Why People Doubt Agents and Still Buy Through Them
Early in a group of working parents, a man in his forties said something that made the whole table laugh. "Insurance agents ah, all want commission one. Cannot trust." Everyone agreed. About twenty minutes later, when we asked each person how they had bought their last policy, he explained that his agent was a former secondary school classmate (they had shared a desk in Secondary Two), that he had bought four policies from her over twelve years, and that he had never once compared prices. "She is different," he said. Nobody at the table found that strange. I did, at first. I've since come to think that little contradiction holds most of what insurers get wrong about the way people here buy protection.
The puzzle is easy to state. Singapore has had a cheaper, no-commission way to buy simple life cover for more than a decade, and a public portal for comparing it. Almost nobody uses it for the big decisions. People say they are wary of advisers, and they keep signing with advisers. That seems irrational until you listen to what the adviser is actually doing for them, which (in our experience, at least) has less to do with products than with carrying a decision that feels too heavy to hold alone.
What the channel numbers say about who sells insurance
Look first at the market. LIA Singapore's full-year 2025 results break new business down by channel. Financial adviser representatives brought in 35.7 per cent of weighted premiums, bank representatives 32.9 per cent, and tied agents 28.2 per cent. Online direct channels brought in 1.2 per cent (one point two, not twelve). The policy count tells a slightly different story. Online direct accounts for 10.0 per cent of policies. People are happy, in other words, to buy small, simple cover on a website and then go back to a human for anything that costs real money.
And it is not for lack of options. The MAS announcement from March 2015 launched both compareFIRST and Direct Purchase Insurance, simple life products sold without commission or advice, with lower premiums as a result. MoneySense's guide to direct purchase insurance still describes the deal plainly, and adds a line I think is quietly revealing. Direct products suit you if you already know how much coverage you need. If you don't, it suggests talking to an adviser. So the cheaper door is open, but it is labelled "for people who already have the answer", and most people do not feel they have it.
So do Singaporeans actually distrust their advisers?
This is where I had to correct my own assumption. I went in expecting the survey data to show low trust in agents. It doesn't, or not in the way I expected. The industry's Insurance Trust Indicator Study, as reported by AsiaOne in November 2024, gave life insurance agents and financial advisers a score of 73, unchanged from the year before and slightly higher than life insurers themselves at 70. The 2025 edition, released in April 2026, then found general downward shifts in trust across life and general insurers, with weaker scores on integrity, competence, and dependability for life insurers.
Actually, the scores and the focus group laughter fit together better than they first appear. The suspicion people voice is aimed at the category (agents, as a type of person who calls you after a wedding). The trust is placed in an individual, usually someone with a second relationship attached, a cousin, a church friend, the classmate. A survey asks about "insurance agents and financial advisers" and gets something between the two. A group discussion lets people say both things out loud, which is why the contradiction only shows up when you listen.
Regulators have tended to share the category worry. The MAS FAQs on the Balanced Scorecard framework describe it as applying to volume-based pay that may result in product pushing or aggressive selling. Consumers rarely know the framework exists (I have not met a participant who could name it). What they carry instead is a story about somebody who was sold the wrong plan.
Why complexity keeps the adviser in the room
Now look at what people say they want. The LIA Protection Gap Study 2022, prepared by EY, included a survey of 775 economically active adults. It found a 74 per cent critical illness protection gap, and 52 per cent of respondents asked the industry to use plain language to describe benefits and coverage. The same 52 per cent share asked for simpler illustrations and more straightforward products. When people were asked why they had not bought more cover, 50 per cent said they could not afford it and 47 per cent said premiums were too expensive.
Complexity is not standing still, either. The Ministry of Health's new rules for Integrated Shield Plan riders mean that riders sold from 1 April 2026 can no longer cover the minimum deductible, and the co-payment cap rises from $3,000 to $6,000 a year. Try explaining the difference between an old rider and a new one to a tired parent at 9pm (I have watched an adviser try). Few people can do it in a sentence. That is exactly the moment a person reaches for a human who can.
And people are not handing that job to software. A July 2026 Insurance Business report on an MDRT survey found only 31 per cent of Singaporean AI users would trust AI to review a long-term financial plan, and among people who would not act on AI advice, 45 per cent pointed to the lack of human oversight or reassurance. Reassurance is the word I keep circling. Even FWD, one of the more digital brands in the market, tells shoppers on its DIRECT Term Life page that they can buy by making an appointment with a customer service consultant. The direct product still offers a person.
Four ways people hand over an insurance decision
Most insurer segmentations begin with income bracket and life stage, and my first sketch did too. The policy stories kept cutting across it. What separates people is how confident they feel about their own sense of how much cover they need, and how much they trust the particular person across the table. We sketch it on the whiteboard as the Advice Dependence Matrix, and the labels will probably change once we test it with bancassurance customers, who seem to behave a little differently again.
The Advice Dependence Matrix
Reluctant Dependents are the paradox in person, and probably the group insurers understand least. They are not persuaded by the adviser. They buy because the alternative (deciding alone, getting it wrong, and a spouse finding out at the worst moment) feels worse than paying commission to someone they half believe. Full Delegators look loyal on a retention report, but I think that loyalty is fragile, because it is loyalty to one person, and when that person leaves the industry (or simply retires) the policy suddenly feels like a stranger's. The Sounding-Board Buyers interest me most (and they may be a growing group, though I can't prove that). They do their homework and still want a human to say "yes, this one is fine", as if the adviser's real product for them is permission.
What people say about advisers, and what their policies show
Ask directly and people give the answer a sensible adult should give. Ask them to walk through the policies they actually hold, and a different pattern appears.
| What participants say | What their buying history shows |
|---|---|
| "Agents just want commission" | Most of their policies were bought from one adviser they describe warmly |
| "I always compare before I buy" | Comparison happened for travel or car insurance, rarely for whole life or critical illness cover |
| "I would buy online to save money" | Online purchases are small term or accident plans, big policies still go through a person |
| "I know what my policies cover" | Few could say whether their hospital rider was an old or new design without calling the agent |
| "I bought because I needed the protection" | The trigger was usually an event, a birth, a friend's diagnosis, a new flat |
None of this means people are lying. They are describing their principles (sincerely, as far as I can tell) and forgetting their habits, the same gap we have traced in how high-net-worth clients describe their investment decisions. It also explains why a brand tracker can show falling trust in the industry while an insurer's own agency force keeps selling. Both measurements are correct. They are measuring different objects.
Getting past the polite answer about advisers
Ask Singaporeans whether they trust their adviser and the answer comes back polite and tidy, and it says almost nothing about the next purchase. So we work from documents and stories. In in-depth interviews, participants bring a policy they hold (with personal details covered) and tell us the story of how it was bought, who else was in the room, and what they would do if the adviser disappeared tomorrow. Money and mortality are topics people will not always open up about in front of strangers, which is why one-to-one work usually comes first here, and why focus groups work better later, once we know which stories are safe to discuss in a group.
From the interview guide: "Imagine your agent calls to say she is leaving the industry next month. What is the first thing you would do with your policies?" People who answer "check what I actually have" are often Full Delegators. People who answer "nothing, I already know what I have" are often Sounding-Board Buyers. The pause before the answer says a great deal as well.
We also watch the advice itself, because what consumers remember of an advice session and what was said are rarely the same. Our work on auditing the advice bank customers actually get uses mystery shoppers for that reason. The spouse matters too. Many policies are decided by a partner or an adult child who never meets the adviser, a pattern close to what we see in caregiver research on the hidden decision-maker, and indirect techniques from our guide to projective techniques in Singapore focus groups help people talk about a death they would rather not name. Digital insurers face a version of the same problem we found in research on Singapore's digital banking customers, where convenience wins the small decisions and loses the large ones. All of it rests on the same Singapore consumer research expertise we bring to other categories.
The adviser sells reassurance more than the policy
People here do not buy big policies through advisers because they trust advisers as a group. Or rather, they trust one adviser and distrust the rest, which is a different thing. They buy because a person absorbs the fear of choosing wrong, and that service is worth commission to them, even when they grumble about it. If you are building a direct channel, cheaper premiums alone will probably not move the Reluctant Dependents, since price was never the main barrier for them. What might move them is a way to feel reassured without feeling sold to. I'm still not sure what that looks like at scale. A fair first test is whether a direct channel could ever earn the line that man used about his classmate, "She is different."
What insurers ask about adviser trust and buying behaviour
Why do Singaporeans buy insurance through agents instead of online?
Do Singapore consumers trust insurance agents and financial advisers?
What is direct purchase insurance in Singapore?
What makes insurance decisions hard for Singapore consumers?
How should insurers research customer trust in advisers?
Understanding why your customers buy through advisers they say they doubt
Channel data shows where policies are sold, and it cannot show what the adviser is really doing for the buyer. We run in-depth interviews and focus groups with Singapore insurance customers to map how they hand over decisions, what reassurance they need, and what would make a direct or hybrid channel feel safe.
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