Insurance made easy

Final Cut
by Edsel-Thadeus O. Lorete

Selling insurance is no easy business. It is costly and few people manage to pay their insurance policy premium in full. Despite the occasional sales slump suffered by insurance firms, life insurance companies are here to stay. Their existence remains a practical necessity for human survival, for those who do not have disposable income when they need it most. The problem is that people, because of the oil and food crises, tend to shy away from anything that does not deliver fast income returns. Pioneer Life Insurance, one of the country’s oldest insurance firms, has found a friendly way to re-introduce insurance through Sparx, a card the company claims to be both an insurance and savings that you can purchase similar to buying cellphone card offered in supermarkets.

Each card is guaranteed a specific interest maturing at a specific time frame. The card, however, is a one time purchase, but it is free of the usual premium interests associated with insurance policies that hook a client to dizzying installment plans for years. Sparx has two types of insurance cards, one for children, which encourages students to save, and another for adults, sold in varying denominations where any card holder can save or build up his insurance by as much as P44,536 (child) and P500,000 (adult), respectively.

It sounds like an easy installment insurance deal made in heaven. All that one needs to do is keep on buying the card insurance that can be activated by a single call to a call center or by simply logging on to www.pioneer.com.ph for registration. Upon policy activation, a customer can choose to receive approved insurance either by text, e-mail or the traditional form signed between agent and client. While this insurance scheme seems practical and useful, its employment of SMS or even the internet services has yet to get tested against fraudulent attacks or from prying hackers looking for weak systems to penetrate and exploit. A text message, regardless of how practical it is as an information tool, does not always guarantee security. It can be denied. What is admirable here is how Pioneer Life has made insurance simple and readily available to a mass market craving for economic development opportunities that’s within their meager economic parameters. For more information, please call +63 2 8127777 or log on to www.pioneer.com.ph.