Cecil Bong

What was your last drawn Income Range before joining the financial planning industry?
My annual last drawn income was SGD 75,000

How long have you stayed in your previous job before becoming a financial planner?
I was a qualified Accountant with 11 years’ of accountancy and audit experiences in the commercial business world since Year 2000, before I joined my current agency in 2011.

Was it more of a Push or Pull Factor? Can you elaborate a little?
It is more of a career bottleneck & work-life balance.

How long have you been in the Financial Sector?
It has been a wonderful and enriching 10 years since I’ve kickstarted my career in financial planning.

What was the biggest fear before joining the business? And how did you overcome it?
There was not much fear before joining the insurance line. It is more of faith, in which I have been holding on and braving forward with it.

In your own opinion, what are the key attributes of your success?
I think the key attributes that contributed are mainly my consistent efforts in comprehensive planning, disciplined professionalism in managing work and clients, sincere personality in understanding and putting clients’ interests as my constant priority. Therefore, gaining trust from my clients and colleagues, which resulted in establishing a pretty strong foothold in this line over the years.

What are some of the awards you have achieved?
To date, with the support of my clients, family and friends, I am happy to have achieved 5 MDRT, 4 Agency Gold Awards, 3 Superstar Gold, 1 Million Dollar Club (Gold), Top Financial Services Consultant in LIG (2020 & 2021), and President Club’s Top Financial Services Consultant in LIG.

What is your specialization in insurance?
My specialisations are Corporate Risk Management and Personal Wealth Planning.

What were some key challenges when you first started? How did you cope with, and overcome it?
One of the key challenges I had back then was, slight fear of rejections from the market. My action plan in overcoming this was I started off with cold marketing through immense hard work efforts, maintaining resilience, continuously improving myself, constantly harbouring the faith that I can do it. Eventually, I was proven with track records. With the cold market’s success and to date, the warm market started to approach or come to me naturally.

The other challenge over the years, was the evolving digital media technology era. This in which, had made the nature of the financial planning industry to be more conveniently accessible for target customers, but at the same time, heightens the overall market competition. The way to cope with it was to constantly update myself with the newest markets and financial insights. At the same time, self-upgrade with my learning, and creating a social media marketing presence for my personal corporate branding.