Asian
briefings
a special supplement to ACC Docket
graciously sponsored by UBIC, Inc.
SAVE THE DATE
March 2014 Asian Briefings
Drafts due by Nov. 29
1 Building Your Brand In Southeast Asia
By Maggy Baccinelli
5 Using Technology to Minimize Information
Governance Liability During Cross-Border
Discovery and Investigations
By Stephen S. Wu and Paul Starrett
10 Westward Expansion of Data Privacy Laws
and Blocking Statutes to Asia: Impact on US
Litigation and Discovery Requests
By Mukesh Advani
Building Your Brand
in Southeast Asia
By Maggy Baccinelli ( baccinelli@acc.com), ACC
Putting aside standard procedure
Just five months after Manulife expanded its insurance services to Cambodia in 2012, the first Cambodian
to ever attempt planting the country’s
flag at the top of Mount Everest, and
Manulife’s client, died while scaling
the mountain in Nepal. Lim Piseth’s
death had wide exposure in Cambodian news, but his life insurance
claim lacked many of the standard
processing documents, including his
death certificate, which the Nepalese
government was supposed to sign.
“There were a lot of phone calls
made into the night about how to
handle the situation,” says Clive An-
derson, Manulife’s head of legal and
compliance – Southeast Asia. “Funda-
mentally, we wanted to look after our
customers, this family, and abide by
our basic principles of trustworthiness
and reliability. So we spent time with
the family, expressed our condolences
and filed the claim. I think we did the
right thing, and it showed the Cam-
bodian people what Manulife’s brand
stands for.”
Anderson has worked at Manu-
life for seven years, first in Canada,
and since 2010, in Singapore. He
oversees Manulife’s legal and compli-
ance functions in seven Southeast
Asian countries, including Singapore,
Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the
Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
Manulife’s Pan-Asia growth strategy
has three components: 1) expanding
the company’s product range beyond
insurance into wealth management; 2)
diversifying its distribution channels
from its internal agency force to also
including financial service entities;
and 3) building the company’s brand
in the region. Flexibility is key to the
latter, Anderson says. “Sometimes you
have to put aside standard procedure,
because it just doesn’t work.”
So too was the case in 2011, when
the largest earthquake in Japan’s
