Former Chubb Life Hong Kong head steps into new role
The former president of Chubb Life Hong Kong, Michael Ho, has joined Resonance Asia, an executive search consultancy focusing on hiring senior executives for financial services companies.
As managing director, Ho will lead the newly launched Singapore office and has relocated from Hong Kong to the city-state, AsianInvestor can reveal.
“The company is already registered in Singapore and has applied for a license, which is expected soon,” Ho told AsianInvestor.
Ho is expected to further build on Resonance's executive search capabilities in the insurance industry.
Ho, who has close to 25 years of experience in insurance, left Chubb Hong Kong in January 2022. He joined Resonance in February 2023.
In the meantime, he opted to spend more time with family after the COVID-19 pandemic created challenges for meeting them regularly. “They were in Singapore and I was in Hong Kong,” he said.
His previous working stints include senior roles at Prudential in Hong Kong and AXA Minmetals Assurance in Beijing.
Resonance Asia, headquartered in Hong Kong, has another office in Japan.
All the teams across these locations, including Singapore, will collaborate to serve clients in Asia and internationally, he said.
HIRING FOR INSURERS
Ho said his experience with insurers in both developing and developed markets in a variety of roles gives him unique insights on how the industry operates.
He believes he has the skills to assess what a potential role’s challenges could be and what specific skills a candidate needs to have to handle those situations. “It should bring a more commercially scientific approach to assessing if an executive candidate is right for the role,” he said.
Demand for executive staff in the insurance industry across the Asia Pacific is evolving.
“In the past 20 years, the insurance industry was really about growth and sizing the opportunities of digital transformation. Now it is also about protecting furthermore the bottom line and making sure that entities are able to scale,” Marc Baloch, founder and managing director at Resonance Asia, told AsianInvestor.
In the past, head offices in Europe or the US, Canada used to effectively see Asia as one-dimensional, he said. “But this is shifting and companies are now placing bets in pockets of growth.”
There is a lot of investment coming into the industry by way of mergers and acquisitions, as well as via private equity investments, Baloch said. “That is encouraging significant bets on scaling up in some countries and making the operations best-in-class.
"If you are not in the top three or five in the country, it’s likely there will be pressure to exit. For search firms, that is an opportunity to partner with companies to transform the country leadership,” he added.
Over the past three years, client requests for country CEO roles have been all about transformation, Baloch said.
“There is such a high demand for transformative leadership now that the search industry needs to add more science to the art of leadership advisory."