Manulife Financial Corporation (also known as Financière Manuvie in Quebec) is a Canadian multinational insurance company and financial services provider headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. The company operates in Canada and Asia as "Manulife" and in the United States primarily through its John Hancock Financial division. As of December 2021, the company employed approximately 38,000 people and had 119,000 agents under contract, and has 1.4 trillion in assets under management and administration. Manulife at one point serviced over 26 million customers worldwide. Manulife is the largest insurance company in Canada and the 28th largest fund manager in the world based on worldwide institutional assets under management (AUM). Manulife Bank of Canada is a wholly owned subsidiary of Manulife. History Manulife was incorporated as "The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company" by Act of Parliament on 23 June 1887 and was headed by Canada's prime minister, John A. Macdonald, and Ontario's lieutenant-governor, Alexander Campbell (there were no conflict-of-interest guidelines at the time and it was not unusual for public persons to be involved in private industry). The idea for the company came from J. B. Carlile, who came to Canada as an agent for The North American Life Assurance Company. It was his firsthand experience on which the new company's product portfolio was based. Private stock company The firm was founded as The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company in 1887. Its first president was John A. Macdonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada. By 1890 the company sought to add additional financier support, appointing prominent Toronto businessmen W.G. Gooderham and Edward Roper Curzon Clarkson, whose accounting firm Clarkson Gordon & Co provided the auditing services for the company. The company sold its first policy outside of Canada in Bermuda in 1893, where the company had opened its first auxiliary agency the same year. In 1894, policies were sold in Grenada, Jamaica and Barbados; Trinidad and Tobago, and Haiti in 1895; and British Honduras, British Guiana, China and British Hong Kong in 1897. In 1901, Manulife amalgamated with the Temperance and General Life Assurance Company, a Toronto-based Canadian life insurer that provided preferred rates to abstainers of alcohol. Manulife continued to offer abstainers rates into the 1920s. In 1931, it opened its first southern China branch in British Hong Kong. Shortly thereafter, it established itself as a leading life insurer in the region with branches in Macau, Shantou and Amoy. Mutual company In 1958, shareholders voted