Recently there have been a lot of buzz in the financial industry. First, the Singapore Government Savings Bond was announced. Second, the web aggregator and Direct Purchase Insurance was launched.

Direct Insurance

In 2012, Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) released their results of their mystery shopping whereby there were 126 mystery shoppers who in total made 500 visits to 11 licensed banks and 4 registered insurance companies seeking financial advice from their representatives. The recommended products were subsequently reviewed for their suitability by a panel of industry practitioners. The most alarming findings to me was that almost 30% of the recommended products were unsuitable! This statistics implies that 1 out of every 3 insurance policies that you have should not have been bought in the first place. A suite of recommendations were made by the Financial Advisory Industry Review (FAIR) committee and we have just seen one of the recommendations being implemented – a ......