Canadian insurer Sun Life is launching an integrated private wealth platform aimed at helping high-net-worth individuals build, preserve, and transfer assets across borders. Life insurers are moving aggressively into wealth management, seeking to serve customers who already rely on insurance products to protect their finances.

Asia is the world’s fastest-growing wealth region, with HNWI wealth rising 10.5% to $29.7 trillion in 2025, according to Capgemini’s World Wealth Report. As families in the region increasingly operate across multiple jurisdictions, demand is rising for services that can coordinate assets, beneficiaries, and planning across different legal and tax systems.

“A typical client today lives in Singapore, their children study in the U.S. or U.K., and they have a family home in Malaysia or Miami,” Sujoy Ghosh, CEO of Sun Life’s global High Net Worth (HNW) business, told Fortune at the insurer’s Singapore office.

Ghosh said Asia’s wealthy are also hedging against domestic economic risks and political instability. “They might buy a policy in Bermuda to grow their money, a savings policy in Hong Kong, and an indexed universal life policy in Singapore for protection,” he said, adding that the region’s wealth hubs complement one another through different strengths, regional access, and regulatory advantages.

He said Singapore is popular for its stability and strong regulatory framework, while Bermuda is attractive because of its proximity to North America and its reputation for managing HNW insurance.

Insurance as a wealth management tool

According to Sun Life’s 2025 legacy planning research, 67% of Singapore-based clients and 44% of Hong Kong-based clients are concerned that their wealth may not be preserved beyond their children’s generation.

That concern is pushing insurance beyond simple protection and into a broader role as a wealth planning and governance tool in Asia, especially for families balancing succession, cross-border holdings, and long-term liquidity needs. “Clients like the certainty of liquidity that insurance offers, as it provides a designated amount of assets for a designated person at a designated time,” Ghosh said. “Given the current macroeconomic environment, many customers value resilience and reliability in wealth planning.”

Other insurers are also positioning their products as wealth management tools.

“After COVID when the border reopened, we saw mainland Chinese customers coming back to Hong Kong, but these were high-net-worth customers, rather than the mass affluent,” Sally Wan, CEO of AXA Greater China, previously told Fortune. She added that many clients now wrap up to 10% of their assets into insurance policies. “They were looking for diversification and protection, especially for family business and legacy planning.”

AXA recently launched its own wealth management platform, which Wan also leads. AXA is among the insurers expanding beyond traditional protection products and into broader advisory and wealth services as competition intensifies for affluent clients.

The next wave of millionaires

Emerging markets including India, Brazil, Mexico, and Southeast Asia are expected to be major centers of wealth creation, according to BCG’s 2026 global wealth report. By 2030, emerging economies are expected to gain nearly $12 trillion in assets, and the affluent-and-above segment—defined as those with more than $250,000 in financial wealth—is forecast to grow 8% annually across these markets.

Financial institutions are moving quickly to capture that growing client base. On July 20, Malaysian bank CIMB, No. 34 on Fortune’s Southeast Asia 500 ranking, launched its own private wealth offering, combining bespoke advisory services with curated wealth solutions.

“We are seeing a great rewiring of wealth, especially in the ASEAN region. Multiple generations are actively involved in the rapid evolution of wealth creation, protection and intergenerational transfer, all happening at the same time,” said Haniz Nazlan, CIMB’s CEO of group consumer banking, in a press release. “Clients are seeking trusted partners to navigate the complexity of wealth management to grow, preserve and transition their wealth legacies.”

Sun Life is also looking beyond traditional wealth hubs as it builds out the platform. “We’re looking globally, from Latin America to India and other emerging economies,” Ghosh said. “Whichever location the money is flowing to and from, that’s where we want to be.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com