WH Soo and the distance between a desk and a customer

When Soo Wai Har took charge of Berjaya Sompo Insurance in April 2026, the new job came with a nationwide network to get acquainted with. In her account of her first 100 days, she described visits to every branch, conversations with agents and brokers, and time with the regional leadership team. There were board meetings, too. And a tuna feast. Insurance may be a business of carefully measured exposures, but its working life still accommodates a generous lunch.

The branch visits make a useful opening to a career that is usually compressed into a succession of corporate names: AIG, AXA, Generali, Sompo. Known professionally as WH Soo, and in appointment announcements as Soo Wai Har, she has worked across financial management, commercial insurance, technical operations and distribution. Each role approaches the same transaction from a different side. Someone faces a risk. Someone has to understand it, price it, explain the protection and keep the promise.

The signature before the job title

One early piece of her professional record is strikingly unglamorous. On 27 April 2010, Soo signed the statutory declaration accompanying Chartis Malaysia’s financial statements for 2009. The company had previously been known as AIG General Insurance (Malaysia). The declaration identified her as the director primarily responsible for financial management. A signature in a set of accounts is a modest visual event. The responsibility attached to it is considerably larger.

That detail gives some weight to her qualification as a chartered accountant, which Berjaya Sompo later highlighted when announcing her appointment. Financial management was an actual responsibility in her insurance career. Reading the subsequent job titles against that starting point, the movement is toward a wider field of decisions: the risks the business accepts, the relationships through which it sells, and eventually the organisation as a whole.

By June 2013, she was identified as AIG Malaysia’s senior vice president for commercial lines and deputy CEO. At the local launch of CyberEdge, she discussed an accompanying iPad app with tools including a breach-cost calculator, incident information and a glossary. The device dates the moment rather nicely. The concern behind the launch remains recognisable: businesses were becoming dependent on technologies whose risks needed explaining.

Soo pointed to social networking, mobile devices and cloud computing as reasons data-security exposures would grow. The practical task was to make an emerging risk intelligible to a business audience. A calculator and a glossary are revealing choices. Both help turn an unfamiliar problem into something a customer can examine, discuss and potentially act upon.

The broker was already on the agenda

In March 2015, the Asia Insurance Brokers’ Summit in Kuala Lumpur listed Soo as AIG Malaysia’s head of brokers and clients management and deputy CEO. It also listed her as chair of a panel on women in broking. The planned discussion covered mentoring, sponsorship, professional networks and the next generation of women brokers. Alongside the technical business of insurance sat a question about who gets the support to progress within it.

The panel brought together participants from Steadfast, Indonesia’s insurance and reinsurance brokers’ association, Syarikat Takaful Malaysia and UNiBA Partners. That setting matters to the shape of her career: her responsibilities placed her among the intermediaries and professional networks through which insurance reaches its customers. Relationships were part of the formal job description, with a place on the conference programme to prove it.

Three months later, another programme put the same subject under her name in Seoul. The Malaysian Insurance and Takaful Brokers Association’s CEO conference scheduled her to speak about redefining the broker’s role in the value chain. She was also listed for a panel about how industry participants could change their coexistence. The vocabulary belonged to a conference room; the underlying issue was practical. What useful work should each participant do for the customer?

Those two agendas capture a professional preoccupation years before her latest CEO appointment. Brokers occupy an important meeting point between a client’s circumstances and an insurer’s capabilities. Soo’s work required attention to that meeting point. Her later branch visits belong in a career that had already given distribution relationships substantial space.

Risk has an address

At AXA Affin, Soo’s responsibilities included the chief technical officer position, recorded in the Malaysian Insurance Directory for 2018/2019. Its following edition listed her as chief commercial lines officer. Technical and commercial work appear side by side in this part of her record. The first concerns how an insurer understands the exposure; the second brings those capabilities into its business relationships.

Her contribution to a Malaysian Re insurance study made the underlying difficulty concrete. Discussing flood risk, she highlighted rural and lower-income communities’ exposure and the problem created when risk is concentrated in particular places. Her argument distinguished an industry’s technical ability to insure a risk from the difficulties of putting workable coverage around it. She raised compulsory cover as a possible government response to adverse selection.

That is a more specific problem than the familiar instruction to make insurance accessible. A product needs a workable structure as well as willing customers. Geography, the concentration of losses and the mix of people taking cover all affect that structure. Soo’s comments show her engaging with those mechanics, including the point at which a commercial question becomes a public-policy question.

A conversation about who gets included

In 2019, the United Nations Capital Development Fund interviewed Soo at MyFintech Week in Malaysia. The discussion concerned fintech’s potential to widen financial inclusion and the areas attracting financial corporations’ attention. Bank Negara Malaysia hosted the event with UNCDF. Its programme included a demonstration day for the B40 Challenge, where selected fintech candidates pitched innovations for an opportunity to work with UNCDF.

The interview placed her commercial insurance experience inside a broader conversation about access. Technology can change how a financial service is offered, but the interesting question remains who can use it. The setting brought insurers and other financial businesses into contact with people developing new approaches. For Soo, it was another public engagement with the route between a financial institution and the person it hopes to serve.

The CEO’s work arrives in the details

Generali appointed Soo chief executive of its Malaysian life insurance company effective 1 February 2025. She succeeded Rebecca Tan, who moved to lead Generali Indonesia, and reported to Fabrice Benard, country head of Generali’s Malaysian entities. The announcement emphasised her experience across commercial lines, technical operations and leadership. It described an internal appointment drawing on a range of insurance responsibilities.

In a June 2025 interview, Soo discussed staff development, mentoring, service standards and digital improvements. Her comments about artificial intelligence were framed as exploration: claims processing, a possible voicebot and smaller implementations in underwriting and customer service. These were proposed areas of work. They should be read as priorities she described at the time, rather than a declaration that every system had already arrived.

She also described monitoring workplace measures including gender balance and equal pay. “We report these annually to the Group,” she said. The line is brief, but it gives the subject an operational form: measures, a reporting cycle and accountability. The topics on that 2015 panel about support and professional opportunity had found a different expression inside the running of a company.

A new name on the door, a nationwide itinerary

Berjaya Sompo announced Soo’s appointment on 26 March 2026, with a start date of 1 April. She succeeded Tan Sek Kee, who had led the company since 2017 and was to remain until June to support the handover. Based in Kuala Lumpur, she reports to Kenneth Reilly, Sompo’s Asia Pacific insurance CEO. Her brief covers sustainable profitability, scale and the capabilities of the Malaysian business.

The organisation described at her appointment employed around 570 people, with 15 offices and more than 2,500 agents. That gives the branch tour a useful sense of scale. Her first months included regional discussions as well as local visits, with the outgoing CEO involved in the transition. The assignment required her to learn a new business while taking responsibility for its direction.

“I have spent much of my time listening, learning and connecting with the people who are the backbone of our success.”

Soo Wai Har · first-100-days update, July 2026

Her update also included a staff dinner, a dragon boat event in Putrajaya and a celebration with top agents over tuna. Alongside those occasions, she described strengthening the leadership structure and bringing in talent to improve underwriting and operations. The account gave room to both the machinery of the business and the people expected to make it work.

A career like this can look tidy when reduced to titles. Its public details are more interesting: a financial declaration, a cyber-risk calculator, a conference discussion about mentoring, a question about flood coverage, a branch visit. Each asks for a different kind of attention. Together, they describe an executive whose responsibilities have repeatedly brought technical decisions into contact with customers and the people serving them.

The next part of Soo’s career will be judged through the business she now leads. Her opening itinerary offers a concrete place to begin watching: the branch, the agent’s conversation, the work behind the policy. For a chief executive based in Kuala Lumpur, getting to know the organisation meant going out to meet it.