Head of legal | Yunfeng Financial Group
Gordon Sng
Head of legal | Yunfeng Financial Group
How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?
Yunfeng Financial Group Limited, a HKEX-listed integrated financial services group, has been focusing on strengthening core businesses, investing in key markets, and divesting non-core assets. As Head of Legal of Yunfeng Financial Group, and concurrently managing the legal function of our subsidiary, YF Life Insurance International Limited, my legal team plays a critical role in the execution of the Group’s business strategy, navigating business teams through legal and operational risks, advising on investments, divestments and managing disputes, negotiating with counterparties and brokering strategic collaborations, and connecting cross-border functional teams working across different languages.
Do you have a cause, business-related or otherwise, that you are passionate about?
The insurance industry in Hong Kong is heavily regulated and very conservative, and I would love to see the insurance industry (and regulatory environment) embrace technological advances, especially in AI-enabled precision medicine and longevity biotechnology.
Rapidly-ageing populations is the major demographic trend in Hong Kong, Mainland China, and much of East Asia, including Singapore, with massive spillover effects on insurance, investment, healthcare and retirement planning. As a response to its rapidly aging population, Mainland China has announced reforms to gradually raise its statutory retirement age, and many other countries are also implementing similar policies.
At the same time, rapid developments in AI-enabled precision medicine and longevity biotechnology, can provide targeted personalized interventions to extend both the life-span and “health-span” of individuals, who can then keep working (and investing) for longer periods, delaying retirement, age-related illnesses / disabilities, and death.
However, the insurance industry in Hong Kong has not come to grips with the interplay between rapidly aging populations and developments in AI-enabled precision medicine and longevity biotechnology, and the future impact on insurance investments, annuities and claims. Insurance companies should consider adopting a more personalised approach to underwriting, including assessing an individual’s genetic, epigenetic and medical reports, and coming up with a ‘health risk rating’ (analogous to the credit-rating used by financial institutions) to charge insurance premiums (and manage risks) more accurately.
Aging is the common factor in the major causes of death, such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, stroke, and heart disease. Instead of paying for ‘sick-care’, i.e. making large insurance payments to treat the symptoms of these age-related diseases only when they manifest, the focus should shift to paying for ‘health-care’, i.e. making smaller, earlier insurance payments for preventive medical interventions treating aging as a disease, so that their insurance clients can maintain youthful mental and physical health for a longer ‘health-span’, thus delaying / minimizing insurance pay-outs for medical treatments, critical illnesses and death.
Hong Kong has world-leading scientists from Quantum Life Limited, an AI-driven longevity technology spin-off from The University of Hong Kong’s research laboratory, supported by funding from the Hong Kong Government under the InnoHK programme. Insurance companies should consider partnering with (and investing in) such AI-enabled precision medicine and longevity biotechnology companies, as this would revolutionize healthcare and the insurance industry.
