I was telling myself I would try and post more frequently in this space this year – maybe every other day. Then life told me – “you don’t have enough time.”
So, maybe I’ll try not to be over ambitious – I guess once a week would already be a huge achievement.
In my earlier post, I’ve shared a bit about my journey into inclusive takaful last year. It has been an exciting one and hopefully it continues to remain exciting this year. And I mentioned too that besides rolling out a product for the lower income segment, we managed to launch another inclusive takaful product – this time for the disabled segment.
On 4 December 2020, we launched our first disabled segment specific product, FWD SpecialCare Direct – a takaful plan covering children with specific learning disabilities: autism, ADHD and Tourette syndrome, protecting both the child and the parent.
The product is a simple offering and at the moment only covers 3 learning disabilities – but 1) it’s our first step at offering disabled segment takaful products seriously, 2) it is meaningful in its own specific way to protect our special one and 3) it’s a statement to the market that takaful products for this underserved segment can and should be offered.
I will attest to you that it wasn’t easy to get even this simple product out to the market – not in a way that is meaningful both in terms of coverage and price points. There were so many walls that needed to be climbed. Many stakeholders were scared of the uncertainties and considered the risks are high for this segment by default. Getting support from retakaful players was tough but thankfully there was one who was willing to go this journey with us – I’m proud to say it’s a local player: Malaysian Re.
But after more than 15 years being in this industry – we finally managed to launch this special product.
Everyone who knows me enough would know that the inspiration and passion to develop such a product comes from my beloved son Ruzain. It started as a dream, which then became a mission to launch a takaful product that would cater for him and anyone in the same shoes as him.
Now, I’m more passionate than ever to try and develop more products to cater for all the disabilities out there – be it physical or intellectual, for different needs in life and all the age groups. It’s going to be challenging journey for sure, so pray that me and some fellow passionate partners of mine will be able to persevere and push through on our mission.
I’ve also realized one of the major benefits of working on the inclusive takaful agenda, be it for the lower income or disabled segments is being able to meet inspiring, and amazing people along the way.
Throughout my life experience, I’ve also come to realized when you start trying to do something good, the journey usually becomes bumpy and thorny – when you want to do something bad, it’s usually pretty easy. But somehow – unexplainable, there will always be wonderful people who sent by the Almighty to help out with our efforts – that’s what happens all the time.
While working on finding the best ways to give a booster in promoting and creating awareness for the FWD SpecialCare Direct, it started off meeting with Adli who runs the Autism Cafe Project, then catching up with Syauqi and Munirah – parents of Uzair who is the Youngest Super Randonneur in the Malaysian Book of Records (and actually the world’s youngest too), and then somehow fate brought us to meet Anne.
Today thanks to her, we had our first sharing session on our FWD SpecialCare Direct product.
I was worried that I wasn’t delivering my best. Ruzain decided he didn’t want to sleep early last night for some reason, we ended up sleeping at 4am+. But probably because everyone at session understood and probably experienced similar situations before, I became eased and relaxed – it was a different yet pleasant sharing experience for me. I was able to comfortably just be myself.
It’s still early days for this particular mission of mine, but I’m surely excited and looking forward to more memorable moments on this particular journey – hopefully I will be able to create more soon.