Great Eastern Holdings (GEH) launched its Prestige Legacy UL product in 2024. “The key question is, what is the investment strategy that is needed to support the product? We are not the first in the market. Other players launched it first in Asia,” says Ronnie Tan, group CFO of GEH.
There were many considerations: did GEH need a partner or a reinsurer to package the product better? Did GEH have the models to quantify the product’s profitability accurately? Would the product introduce earnings volatility?
“We have analysts and shareholders that don’t quite like earnings volatility. We have to take all that into consideration: the investment strategy, the profitability, the earnings volatility, and then we asked ourselves, do we have the processes to be able to capture the proper valuation reporting on the back end? We may sometimes change some of the features to make sure that the profitability is balanced against the competitiveness of the product and the earnings volatility [it creates],” adds Tan. “As a CFO, I need to work with the investment guys, the distribution guys and the marketing guys.”
Universal life or indexed UL products offered by GEH are usually bought for their large death benefit. With indexed UL, the crediting rate depends on the index chosen by the purchaser.
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Even if the index moves in a negative direction, the crediting rate is not negative but zero. A crediting interest rate on a UL product is a variable rate the insurer pays on the policy’s cash value, reflecting investment performance but subject to a guaranteed minimum floor (often 0%).
“We take the customer’s money, we allocate some to a bond to provide the zero guarantee, and then the difference is used to buy an S&P 500 option to give the option upside. That’s how companies manage it,” says Tan.
On GEH’s part, there is no need to hedge as the product is priced in US dollars. “Essentially, we buy the bond to give the guarantees. But instead of giving you the bond interest rate, we take the interest from the bond to buy the option to give you the upside, so customers essentially replace the fixed interest rate with the option return on the index.”
See also: Is there a place for insurance in your portfolio?
GEH introduced two new indices in 2025 for its Prestige Legacy series. The S&P 500 Engle 6% VT TCA Index is a rule-based index that dynamically adjusts its exposure to the S&P 500 index futures using a unique volatility control methodology. The index is built on a volatility forecasting model developed by Nobel laureate Robert Engle, designed to manage market risk while preserving growth potential.
The second new index is the UBS Multi Asset Engle 6% Index, designed to provide dynamic exposure to S&P 500 futures, US 10-year Treasury note futures and gold futures. The index provides multi-asset diversification with a risk-weighted approach using an innovative forward-looking rebalancing model developed by UBS in partnership with Engle.
