What Can Insurance Industry Learn From The Ping An Story?

The great transformation journey of the Chinese giant Ping An is nothing short of remarkable. There are many factors that contribute to their extraordinary success. But what captures our interest is how they reinvented their business model beyond insurance and built a highly integrated digital ecosystem to become part of their customers’ day-to-day lives. They did it all: helped the customer save time, ensured convenience, anticipated their needs, and offered products and services for a lifetime. In other words, they became indispensable.

Upon closer observation, we realize that their continuous technology investments, though initially made to improve operational capabilities, helped them explore untapped opportunities in the internet economy to maximize customer value. Moving their entire legacy to a self-built cloud in 2008, they gradually built a unifying digital platform that, in spite of the network of enterprises they operate, enables them to collect and process zillions of transactions from more than 225 million retail customers. Understanding customers’ behavior couldn’t have gotten better. For customers, with a single login credential, it is easy access and a cross-buying opportunity across the company network. It’s a win-win situation.

Today, Ping An has become not just the largest insurance company worldwide but a tech-driven “finance + ecosystem” conglomerate. A detailed list of Ping An’s ecosystem’s successes would go beyond the scope of this article, but a mention of their top performing businesses: Lufax Holding, OneConnect, Ping An Good Doctor, Ping An HealthKonnect, and AutoHome shows the extent to which the company is reinventing itself and growing in leaps and bounds.