Ping An
The world's largest insurance company
Ping An Insurance Company provides products and services through its five ecosystems in financial services, healthcare, auto services, real estate services and Smart City solutions. The Group's insurance business writes property, casualty, and life insurance products. It is the largest in the world.
Ping An strives to become a world leading technology-powered financial services group. It believes the way people receive financial services and healthcare in the future will be through intelligent ecosystems enabled by technology.
Ping An currently serves around 750 million online customers and 250 million retail customers in its five ecosystems in financial services, healthcare, auto services, real estate services, and smart city solutions.
Technology has enabled the company to bring changes to the landscape of retail finance and healthcare in China. Supported by the Group’s strong core financials, its continued investment in fintech and healthtech resulted in increasing revenue contributions from our tech units as well as several unicorns.
Ping An ranked 7th in Forbes’ 2019 Global 2000 with a market cap of US$220.2b, and 29th in the 2018 Fortune Global 500 with US$144,197m in revenue.
It is the world’s largest and most valuable insurer.
Safe and well
Ping An Insurance was founded by Mingzhe (Peter) Ma in Shenzhen in 1988. The Group was the first insurance company in China to adopt a shareholding structure. It has developed into a personal financial services group with three core businesses — insurance, banking and investment.
“Ping An” literally means “safe and well”.
Ping An endeavors to become a world-leading personal financial service provider upholding the belief of “technology-driven financial services for a better life”, focusing on “big financial assets” and “big health care”. It pursues growth in insurance, banking, asset management, and internet finance and provides customers with an excellent experience of “expertise makes life easier”. It has achieved sustainable growth in profits, and has provided long-term stable returns to shareholders.
For the core finance business, Ping An actively promotes its “One Customer, One Account, Multiple Products, and One-Stop Service” model; as for its Internet finance business, the Group weaves financial services into the very fabric of everyday life, spanning areas such as “health, food, housing, transportation and entertainment”, and gradually realizes synergies with its core finance business.
Ping An has over 1,600,000 employees and life insurance sales agents.
By following its philosophy of “Expertise Creates Value”, in addition to creating value for its shareholders, employees and customers, Ping An actively fulfills its commitment to the corporate social responsibility, pursuing win-win cooperation and progressing in step with all stakeholders. The Group continues to step up its efforts in major disaster relief, the environment, education, the Red Cross, communities and other worthy causes.
Ping An Insurance is now the world’s largest and most valuable insurer, worth US$217 billion (1.4 trillion yuan), as of January 2018. It is also one of the world’s biggest investment and asset management companies, with a total asset of US$958.5 billion (6.5 trillion yuan), as of 2017.
To be global leader in integrated personal finance
- Follow the concept of “Driven By Technology, Finance Can Serve Life Better” to concurrently promote the development of our core finance business and Internet finance business and become a global leader in integrated personal finance;
- Build an integrated financial services platform that is in line with the vision of “One Customer, One Account, Multiple Products and One-Stop Services” and promote cross-selling;
- Core finance business: promote “financial supermarket” and “customer migration” and propel the transformation and migration of “insurance customers to banking and investment customers” and “offline financial business customers to online service users”;
- Internet finance business: Based on the idea of “generate traffic; engage in lifestyles; and provide value-adds”, Ping An will build an Internet financial eco-system engaging in real life scenarios of health, food, housing, transportation and entertainment;
- Grow active customer base and high-quality assets to further enhance our unrivalled competitive advantages;
- Achieve sustainable growth in profits to provide shareholders with stable returns on a long-term basis.
Insurance Business
- Maintain the healthy and steady development of our property and casualty insurance and life insurance businesses while promoting their competitiveness and steady expansion in market share;
- Increase inputs in new business areas such as corporate annuity and health insurance.
Banking Business
- Accelerate the development by fully leveraging the Group’s existing advantages of integrated resources such as customer base, products, channels and platforms to fulfill our strategic target of becoming the “Best Bank”;
- Build Ping An Bank as a core integrated financial service platform to provide the Group’s customers with one-stop integrated financial services.
Investment Business
- Strive to develop the superior investment capacity and establish a leading investment platform;
- Strengthen the asset-liability-management capability while building a solid and comprehensive risk control system;
- Improve and enhance the third-party asset management business by providing a full array of high quality investment products with the aim of becoming a leader in Chinese wealth management market.
Internet Finance
- Engaging in daily living scenarios of health, food, housing, transportation and entertainment, the Company initiated the strategic framework of “One Gate, Two Focuses, Four Markets”, which is to connect a wide range of application scenarios through the “Magic Gate”, accelerate the mining, analysis and application of big data by focusing on asset management and health management, and establish an asset transaction market, a loyalty points transaction market, an automobile transaction market and a real estate financing market, to provide a wide range of users with one-stop financial services.
Ping An beyond finance
The company’s first steps beyond finance started in 2012 with the establishment of Lufax, a wealth management platform. Its aim was to provide an entry point into the fintech and healthtech sectors.
Technology and research and development have now become the Group’s cornerstones, powering its retail financial services operations to a client base of more than 250 million retailers and around 700 million online customers.
As CIO and later COO, JEssica Tan developed a vision of “technology plus finance” as key to Ping An’s ongoing success. Lufax, Chinese car sales website Autohome and Ping An Smart City – which incorporates cloud computing, blockchain and artificial intelligence into traditional infrastructure – are just some of the Group’s ventures that have benefited from her tech-heavy approach. “Whatever business we enter, we have to be in the top three” she says.
“We’ve always been very aggressive on the digitisation front,” Tan told the McKinsey Quarterly in late 2020. “We now spend more than US$1.7 billion of our revenue [on technology R&D] every year. Even though we never really know how technology will change, we think it’s important to have these capabilities.”
The new ventures proved successfully locally, and a global opportunity started to emerge. “We see an opportunity to expand our more tech-driven models overseas because they don’t require significant, in-depth local knowledge and the build-up of local resources, channels, customer preference,” she says.
In 2017 she started to focus on healthcare.
Ping An HealthKonnect (an online healthcare management platform that caters to 800 million people), Ping An Smart Healthcare (the medical arm of Smart City) and Ping An Good Doctor (a free end-to-end online consultation platform and the Group’s major foray into telehealth) were the fruit of these efforts.
She became Group Co-CEO and Executive Director in 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic infected the world. Good Doctor had become China’s largest online healthcare services platform. As the pandemic grew, visits to Good Doctor skyrocketed – by the peak of the pandemic, more than 1.11 billion virtual consultations had been undertaken.
Good Doctor generated more than $1 billion in revenue for Ping An that year. At the same time, HealthKonnect pioneered en-masse Covid testing in China, while Ping An Smart Healthcare’s digitisation scheme helped with social distancing.
A recent snapshot of performance shows how the key new businesses continue to grow:
