All Bases Covered

Calvin Lo has no interest in crypto, preferring to invest money and time in making society more equitable

- Richard Lord

Read a little bit about Calvin Lo, and you’ll find the same descriptions keep coming up. This, you’ll hear, is the world’s most reclusive billionaire, the richest person you’ve never heard of, someone who dodges the limelight almost obsessively. And while that most certainly used to be true, in recent years he’s been coming out of his shell a bit—largely because Covid has completely changed his attitude to philanthropy.

Hong Kong-based Lo made his money in insurance, but not as an insurer, and not by insuring people in the traditional sense, where the idea is to offset potential future costs. Instead, his company, RE Lee, the world’s largest life insurance broker, has been in the vanguard of the explosion over the past two decades of so-called jumbo life insurance, an asset management product that is particularly popular in estate planning, where it can be used to share the money among family members.

“In the late Nineties, in Hong Kong, the biggest life insurance you could buy was probably US$1 million. If you’re an ultra-high-net-worth individual who’s worth hundreds of millions, US$1 million can’t even pay off your credit card. Traditional private banking doesn’t address that problem of: if something happens to me, who’s going to pay the tax? Somehow we were able to convince the carriers that there were people who needed this. Then it went viral: one thing led to another and before we knew it, we were spreading around the world.” With clients in more than 65 countries, the company places about US$1 billion of premiums annually, and enjoyed a record year in 2020, growing by about 25 per cent.