Chathuri Munaweera, Director Legal and Operations of AIA Insurance, explains the breadth and depth of AIA’s commitment to inclusion and women empowerment that goes beyond most other corporations.

While most companies focus on diversity and inclusion within their businesses, AIA has a unique and broad approach to improving opportunities for women. Can you tell us more about it?

At AIA Insurance, we have always promoted a culture of meritocracy, aiming to give all our employees fair and equal opportunities to bring out the best in them and support them to achieve their career aspirations. We understood early that a credible and empowering meritocracy required an impetus to help women overcome various obstacles that often otherwise take precedence over their career choices.

AIA Insurance’s commitment to inclusion goes beyond our employees and extends to our customers, entrepreneurs and the community. True to our business of protection, we represent our association of women empowerment under the platform of ‘Eya Surakina AIA’.

Through this platform, we will launch many initiatives for women including our employees, our entrepreneur-led model of wealth planner agency force, customers and the community at large. These initiatives help women to be courageous, confident, to feel valued and appreciated, while AIA will ensure to protect her and provide her with a safe environment to inspire others. As part of this endeavour, we conducted.

As part of this endeavour, we conducted extensive research on Women and Insurance in Sri Lanka in collaboration with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) a member of the World Bank Group, over the last two years. AIA Insurance was a part of the IFC-DFAT SheWorks Sri Lanka Partnership from 2018-2020. SheWorks contributed to more equal and respectful workplaces for 170,000 employees across 15 of Sri Lanka’s leading organizations. Within the two years of the partnership, 12,000 more women were added to the workforce.

We then further extended the partnership with IFC in 2020 with the research on Women and Insurance in Sri Lanka to engage on women’s insurance as a natural continuation of our next phase for the women’s empowerment agenda.

This collaboration also gave us rich insights into how Sri Lankan women, be it employees, entrepreneurs, customers, and women in communities at large, perceive insurance, and helped us build deep relationships with women across these segments. We used the findings to design solutions from innovative insurance products, reward schemes to celebrate their contributions and success and various programmes to enhance their financial literacy, entrepreneurship, business and support networks and leadership skills.

We collaborate directly with many women in the community, and we are pursuing plans to collaborate with other groups that focus on societal causes similar to AIA. Some of these initiatives will include continuous opportunities for women in the community to network, enhance professional skills, be part of mentorships and leadership programmes, and celebrate their achievements and get rewarded. We are extremely excited to work towards making these partnerships grow with AIA.

All these coming under the umbrella of ‘Eya Surakina AIA’ are beyond a one-off campaign or project. They are integral components of our business and operations in Sri Lanka. We have aligned considerable resources and established measurable KPIs for all these and are very much part and parcel of AIA’s thought leadership in this very important area.

Can you tell us how AIA has increased employment and leadership opportunities for women?

At AIA Group, women represent 59% of employees as of December 2020. Over the past year, AIA Insurance Lanka has increased the proportion of women in its workforce to 41%. Increasing the share of Women in Leadership was a key focus for us. From clearing structural barriers to their career progression to enabling growth through structured learning, coaching, mentoring and on-the-job training, and providing local and foreign exposures, we levelled the playing field for women to excel with 33% of the senior management being women.

We always believed that caring for ourselves and our family helps us be our best at work. So, it is only natural that AIA Insurance became the first EFC member to implement a comprehensive motherhood benefits scheme including 100 days of maternity leave coupled with paternity leave, supporting pre and postnatal care and special medical treatment. We also provide a reimbursable allowance to new moms for additional support. Further, we continue to accommodate flexible working hours with nursing breaks and work from home policy enabling our employees who are mothers as well as fathers to work on flexible work rotations. We are proud that women at AIA do not have to choose between careers and caring for a young family.

If external accolades we have received are an indication of how we have created a workplace with increased opportunities for women, AIA Insurance is a trailblazer of the insurance sector. We were recognized as one of Sri Lanka’s top 10 Women Friendly Workplaces in 2021 by Satynmag.com and CIMA Sri Lanka. We have won the ‘Best Workplaces for Women in Sri Lanka’ (awarded by Great Place to Work®) for four consecutive years, Best organizational culture award is another accolade AIA was awarded by Women in Management (WIM) in partnership with IFC. Most recently, one of our Supreme Wealth Planners, Thakshila Koralage from Agency Distribution won the Gold Award in the sales executive category, insurance industry at the SLIM National Sales Congress (NASCO).

How is AIA empowering women as entrepreneurs?

Insurance sales is a traditionally male-dominated role in Sri Lanka. But we are disrupting the norm by actively recruiting and offering career growth opportunities for women as AIA Wealth Planners and Wealth Planner Managers. Through targeted recruitment campaigns powered by market research, AIA has achieved 45% female representation in its wealth planner cadre; and is looking to increase this further. We are immensely proud of their achievements. Around 53% of women are in the Top 100 High Performing Wealth Planners, bringing in over half of the new businesses.

What about your clients who are women? What does AIA have to offer?

In the wake of our agreement with IFC, we have developed a comprehensive solution-based approach to supporting our women customers. We offer life, health and retirement planning solutions to comprehensibly address their health, protection and investment needs and those of their families. Our portfolio offers an improved maternity cover and a women’s health cover that focuses on female-specific diseases, critical illness, and pregnancy complications and even covers any complications to infants.

We also offer personal accident and disability insurance and life insurance with a built-in savings component to protect women at every stage in their life. In keeping with our promise of helping people live healthier, longer, better lives, we have extended our ecosystem of wellness propositions to the digital realm with services like telemedicine via oDoc or online fitness via Fitzky. Our partnership with Ninewells Hospitals to offer free worldwide personal accidental life insurance cover for Rs1 million to all new parents is another industry first.