FWD Brand Guidelines: The Hong Kong Insurer Built From ING’s Asian Units in 2013

Three markets bought, one new name.

FWD is young by the standards of its trade. English Wikipedia says Richard Li’s Pacific Century Group formed FWD Group in Hong Kong in 2013, after buying ING’s insurance and pension businesses in Hong Kong, Macau and Thailand. A 2016 Bloomberg report, carried by Carrier Management, describes how Li moved into insurance by adding those ING units, a few years after his firm bought the asset manager PineBridge Investments from AIG. FWD tells the same story on its own site: it says it launched its insurance businesses in those three markets in 2013 as “the first step” in a plan to build “a different kind of insurance company.”

The company then expanded quickly. English Wikipedia records a move into the Philippines in 2014 and Indonesia in 2015. In 2016 FWD bought Shenton Insurance in Singapore and agreed to buy a Vietnamese life business from Great Eastern Holdings, the Singapore group behind Great Eastern. In November 2016 AIG agreed to sell its Japanese life unit, Fuji Life, to FWD; the Bloomberg report in Carrier Management called it FWD’s first move into Japanese insurance and quoted the chief executive, Huynh Thanh Phong, on gaining “an extensive distribution network with an established customer base.” Huynh had joined as chief executive in 2013, English Wikipedia says, and still holds the role.

Purchases continued through the decade. English Wikipedia lists the 2019 purchase of MetLife’s Hong Kong business, an agreement the same year to buy SCB Life Assurance, the life arm of Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank, and a 2018 agreement to buy PT Commonwealth Life in Indonesia from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which on completion in 2020 was renamed PT FWD Life Indonesia, as The Jakarta Post reported. In November 2019 FWD agreed to buy Vietcombank-Cardif Life Insurance, a venture of Vietcombank and BNP Paribas Cardif. In Malaysia it took a stake in HSBC Amanah Takaful in 2018, renamed FWD Takaful, and became its majority shareholder in March 2024; in 2023 it invested in Gibraltar BSN Life, renamed FWD Insurance Berhad.

Plain words and “celebrate living.”

FWD’s brand language sets out to sound unlike an insurer. Its group website calls FWD “a different kind of insurance company. Led by our customers. Empowered by technology,” and repeats one line across its pages: the aim of “changing the way people feel about insurance.” The company says it wants to make insurance simpler, “ditching unnecessary jargon” and “smoothing out the claims journey,” so that people “better understand what they’re buying.”

The emotional idea is set out on the same site. FWD describes its philosophy as insurance as “a source of empowerment”: enjoy life, celebrate it, and “if anything happens,” have the confidence that the insurer has “got your back.” It frames the result as giving customers “the freedom to celebrate living,” and its homepage carries a section under that title. The name itself is written as three capital letters, and businesses it bought took it: the Indonesian unit became PT FWD Life Indonesia and the Malaysian ones FWD Takaful and FWD Insurance Berhad.

That voice reached beyond advertising. English Wikipedia says that by April 2017 FWD sponsored Clockenflap, the Hong Kong music festival, citing a 2017 article in The Drum on why FWD did not act like a traditional insurance brand. The group site also lists a bronze Stevie award for innovative achievement in corporate social responsibility.

What FWD sells is broad. English Wikipedia lists life and medical insurance, general insurance, employee benefits and, since May 2024, a health business called FWD HealthyMe. In Malaysia FWD launched a takaful, or Islamic insurance, business in July 2019. In Japan, Insurance Business reported in March 2026, FWD moved beyond its traditional focus on protection into retirement and savings with a yen-denominated single-premium variable annuity.

Design and documentation.

Asian life insurers tend to present themselves in a recognisable way. Wordmarks are usually short and set in warm, open sans-serif letters, often a single company name or a set of initials that can sit on an app icon, a branch fascia and a policy document without changing. Palettes lean on red, orange and blue, colours that read clearly on screens and signs, with plenty of white space around them.

Photography does much of the emotional work. Families, couples, children and older parents appear far more often than buildings or products, and health and everyday activity are recurring themes. Product pages are usually organised by need rather than by policy name: protection, savings, health and retirement, each with its own short explanation and a route to an adviser or an online quote.

Two audiences sit side by side on most of these sites. Customers are offered apps, service hotlines, online claims and, increasingly, wellness and senior-care programmes linked to their cover. Prospective agents are offered recruitment pages that describe training, career paths and the role of the adviser, since agents and partner banks remain important sales channels for many of these companies.

Behind the consumer pages sits a heavier layer of corporate publishing. Listed insurers produce annual reports, interim results and sustainability reports, often in two or more languages, and these documents carry the most formal version of the identity: the full logo, a restricted palette, long-form charts and governance pages. For a designer, studying both layers together shows how one identity stretches from a friendly app screen to a dense, regulated report.

From a dropped US plan to Hong Kong in 2025.

FWD’s route to the stock market was long. English Wikipedia says the company dropped a planned listing in the United States in 2021, filed for a Hong Kong listing in 2022 and refiled its Main Board application on 13 March 2023. It launched its Hong Kong offering in June 2025, and its shares began trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 7 July 2025, citing reports that day in China Daily Hong Kong and the South China Morning Post. Pacific Century Group remains the parent, according to English Wikipedia, which also lists investors including Apollo Global Management, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and the Li Ka Shing Foundation.

The first full year as a listed company followed. Insurance Business reported on 16 March 2026 that FWD’s 2025 results were its first full-year earnings release as a Hong Kong-listed company, describing it as a “pan-Asian life and health insurer” with ten Asian markets. It reports in four segments: Hong Kong and Macau; Thailand and Cambodia; Japan; and Emerging Markets, which covers five Southeast Asian markets. The magazine quoted Huynh saying the July 2025 offering “fulfilled a long-held objective” of giving the group full access to capital markets. English Wikipedia names the ten markets as Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia.

For a design guide, FWD shows how a company assembled from purchased businesses can present itself as a single new name with one tone of voice across ten markets. Compare AIA, another Hong Kong-based pan-Asian insurer with a much longer history, and Great Eastern, whose Vietnamese life business FWD agreed to buy in 2016. For this guide we use a warm orange, a deep green and sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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