Principle Assurance’s Global Distribution Manager, Stephen Douglas Talks about the company’s Rebranding as Regency Assurance

Principle Assurance has officially changed their name to Regency Assurance, following their acquisition of Regency Square earlier this year. The company rebranding is part of an on-going strategy to be make the company and its products more competitive in the global market.

Regency Assurance’s Global Distribution Manager, Stephen Douglas, walks us through the plans of Regency Assurance and the company’s rebranding. 

Learn more about Principle Assurance’s transition into Regency Assurance and more through his full interview below.

Q: Can you tell us about Principle Assurance?

A: Principle Assurance is an international long-term licensed and regulated insurance company. We are an offshore underwriter, and we specialise in international health insurance, life insurance and financial services, usually targeted at the globally mobile community, the expatriate community.

Q: Can you tell us more about the acquisition and rebranding of Regency Square into Regency Assurance?

A: Principle Assurance, acquired Regency Square, a financial services provider out of Europe earlier this year. The reason for this is to bring on board more assets into Principle Assurance, certainly, more of the financial services side of business which will allow us moving forward, to offer a greater and wider range of expatriate focused products both in the insurance perspective and the finance perspective. That was completed earlier in the year, and with that, our strategy in marketing moving forward, we’ve rebranded Principle Assurance to Regency Assurance.

Q: Would you be focusing on a particular market due to this expansion in products and services?

A: Well we operate and support clients in over 120 countries worldwide, we do have a physical presence in Asia, but that’s certainly not our only target market. It is a fully global reach, and we want to expand in those 120 countries certainly in terms of distribution sales, and distribution networks which I’m personally responsible for. So yeah, it’s very exciting because the rebranding also allows us the opportunity to take our existing product line, and improve those and make them more competitive, make them more attractive, and obviously we’re going to be able to do that with feedback from our partners, distributors, brokers, agent, consultants and all sorts of things. So we’re very positive and a lot of our business is coming from Asia currently, but then again, we also get a considerable amount of business from South America, Africa and Europe also.

Q: Is there a certain product that you would like to develop more in line with the rebranding?

A: Our health insurance products are likely to be our main focus, but I can’t give you any specifics for now because we have yet to launch the rebranded, repackaged and improved company. We will be in a more attractive position in the market once that launches in the coming weeks. We’re also offer life insurance on a bespoke group level at the moment, but more as an employee benefit. Going into Q1 of 2017, we’re hoping to launch our first retail individual off the shelf life insurance product, which will be very exciting, certainly in the ASEAN region as an example, it’s a great place in the life insurance market. There are some great opportunities for us, and we know that from the feedback from our existing insurance brokers on the health insurance side that they’re super keen on life insurance and it’s a priority for Regency Assurance in 2017.

Q: Do you see the trend of acquisitions and consolidations continuing in the IPMI industry until 2017?

A: From Principle Assurance’s stand point, we would be the acquirer, certainly be available for acquisition from a global stand point. If the opportunity arises, then I’m sure our board will consider it. But for now, our consolidation with Regency Square puts us in a great position for the short to medium term where that will take us in terms of acquisitions in the future; I probably wouldn’t be able to say.

Q: Is there anything we can look forward to from Regency Assurance upon the launch of the company’s rebranding?

A: Certainly. Our brochure is two-fold in terms of size and content. It provides a lot more information, not just our business ourselves, but also the products and services we provide. As I mentioned, certain benefits will be increased, and new benefits that are not widely used or offered in the IPMI market will be added to our products with no real cost incurred which is not only an extra proposition not just for new prospects, but also for existing clients renewing in 2017. On top of that, we have two new websites that will be launched in the coming weeks.

The first and most exciting one on the sales perspective would be our new marketing website. It would be fully functional, very modern looking, very fresh, very user-friendly. It allows clients to go on there and find out about the products and services that Regency provides. They can go not just to get free quotes for them and their family, but also, buy the insurance coverage themselves. They can buy their coverage online through a very simple, straight-forward, very efficient online process. There will also be a broker realm, a brokerage compartment on the website, which from a distributors angle, the brokers would be able to use that when proposing to prospects.

Those are the main things that I’m personally excited for going into the new year.