HONG KONG and SHANGHAI, Sept. 6, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (hereafter "Ping An" or the "Group", HKEx: 2318; SSE: 601318) announced today that Ping An OneConnect, a subsidiary of Ping An, has launched the "Smart Insurance Cloud" in Beijing, unveiling its two latest products: "Smart Verification" and "Smart Fast Claim" to the insurance industry. Adopting the world's latest AI technology, "Smart Insurance Cloud" features O2O interaction capabilities, offering insurance companies smart services and the ultimate experience of "flexible access, fast upgrade, self-development, and close follow-through", enhancing the use of technology in the insurance industry.
"Smart Insurance Cloud" is the first unveiling of Ping An's core technology in its insurance business to the public. Among which, the "Smart Verification" function brings smart innovations to the traditional model of insurers in terms of policy enrollment, claims, customer services and conservation, as well as ample room of growth for the industry for remote, online and mobile services. "Smart Fast Claim" brings about over RMB20 billion revenue for risk leakage control and enhancing the claims efficiency by over 40%.
The press conference attracted over a hundred property and casualty insurance, life insurance companies and agencies. Representative of small to medium-sized property insurance companies, Mr. Ren Tongqing, member of the joint committee of the Small to Medium-Sized Property Insurance Companies, signed a contract with OneConnect. More than 10 companies including China Continent Insurance, Sunshine Insurance, Pearl River Life Insurance, Manulife-Sinochem Life and Kunlun Health have signed Letters of Intent with OneConnect.
Ms. Jessica Tan, Executive Vice President, Chief Operation Officer and Chief Information Officer of Ping An said during the press conference: "Under the guidance of the 'Internet+' strategy of the country, Ping An continues to advance the building of an open platform. Now, with an industry-wide opening of our platform, we are hoping to help small and medium-sized insurance companies to be connected with the most advanced technology with the lowest cost possible, so as to promote the efficiency, risk control capability, cost control, and customer experience in the overall insurance industry, providing our customers with the ultimate service experience through a combination of insurance and artificial intelligence."
From the policy system to the physical person system, "Smart Verification" brings full innovation to insurers' traditional operation model
The "Smart Verification" function released this time on "Ping An Smart Insurance Cloud" uses AI technologies such as face recognition and voiceprint recognition to build a biological record of each customer, which realizes a speedy verification towards the physical person, its behaviors and attributes. This technology enables the insurance industry to transform from policy system, skipping real-name system, directly to physical person verification system combining physical person, physical proof and policy, solving the prolonged problems of being unsafe, inconvenient and not worry-free in the insurance industry.
By speedy verification of the behaviors and attributes of agents and insured persons though Smart Verification, potential disputes arising from the policy selling process will be significantly reduced. With Ping An's smart verification put into use, the new policy surrender rate fell to 1.4%, well below the industry average of 4%. Time taken for a policy enrollment has been shortened by 30 times, time taken for audio and video recording reduced by 75%, while quality control success rate increased by 65%. The "difficult to claim" problem was tackled by the physical person verification technology combining online intelligence, with processing time shortened from three days to 30 minutes, resulting in increased customer satisfaction as well as a doubling of the coverage increase rate. At the same time, smart verification technology could cover more than 90% of the insurance company's customer service, bringing about a qualitative leap in customer service efficiency.
It is worth mentioning that the applications of smart insurance cloud are not limited to the insurance sector. The smart verification technology can be applied to all scenarios involving physical person verifications, such as opening a bank or securities account.
Immediate Damage Identification + Smart Risk Control, "Smart Fast Claim" assists car insurance industry to reduce risk leakage by RMB20 billion
"Smart Fast Claim" is the core function on "Ping An Smart Insurance Cloud" that is introduced to this industry. This product contains four major technical highlights: (1) High-precision image recognition: smart recognition accuracy up to 90% or more of car models, exterior parts and 23 damage levels. (2) Immediate one-click damage identification: using real-life claim images as training samples, automatic damage determination from the appearance of the vehicle exterior using smart machine learning and algorithms, simply upload an image to assess the price of maintenance proposal in a few seconds. (3) Precise price setting: to achieve accurate price setting, prices are generated through three methods- from the main machine factor, data collected among nine data collection sites or production data generation, prices are precise to the prices of automotive parts in various provinces and municipalities. (4) Smart risk control: the risk library from undertaking an insurance to filing claims, application of logical regression, random forest and other machine learning & algorithms, develop more than 30,000 digital claims and risk control regulations, cover all claims processes of "individual" or "group" risks, and follow up with smart lock of risks, smart interception and post-event smart screening. These may help to effectively reduce cost of claims.
"Smart Fast Claim" is the only artificial intelligence platform for loss assessment and risk management that has been implemented in the automobile insurance industry in China. Ping An owns 100% independent intellectual property rights over the platform. Thanks to the "Smart Fast Claim", Ping An Property & Casualty handled over 4.99 million automobile claims in the first half of 2017, with a Net Promotor Score (NPS) of 82% and intercepted approximately RMB3 billion of leakage risks. When fully implemented in the industry, the platform is expected to substantially improve the overall claims efficiency and reduce the number of disputes and risk of leakage, bringing about over RMB20 billion revenue for risk leakage control and enhancing the claims efficiency by over 40%.
Professional, Flexible, Safe, Empowering Industry with High Efficiency
According to Mr. Shao Haifeng, General Manager of Financial OneConnect, the new Smart Insurance Cloud incorporates 17 core technologies such as human face identification, speaker and speech identification, voiceprint recognition and micro expression, as well as 394 patents owned by Ping An Group, making it another testimonial to the Group's leading technology in financial services which features professionalism, flexibility and safety.
Today, Ping An owns one of the largest big data platforms and the most number of patent applications among Chinese financial institutions. Ping An has over 500 big data scientists, over 20,000 technological R&D staff members, an annual investment of over RMB7 billion in this area and many world-leading technologies, such as human face recognition, voiceprint recognition, prediction AI technologies and prescription AI technologies, which have been applied to hundreds of scenarios. These industry-leading technologies have been widely applied in the Group's business units such as Ping An Property & Casualty, Ping An Life, Lufax Holding, Ping An Puhui and Ping An Good Doctor, and are also applied externally via different platforms such as Financial OneConnect.
As a financial technology services provider of Ping An Group, which has industry-leading and innovative subsidiaries such as Ping An Life and Ping An Property & Casualty, Financial OneConnect is benefited from the Group's invaluable experience and database. Its "super-fast + super-intelligent" insurance service is poised to enhance client experience and turn a new era for the industry.
For insurance companies, another advantage of "Smart Insurance Cloud" is the offering of flexibility and convenience to their users. "Smart Insurance Cloud", with APP, SDK, API access methods, is able to meet a variety of business requirements. On the other hand, users can access open.jryzt.com, an open platform of Financial OneConnect, to connect the specialized products to their own operating systems through online or offline channels for an instant upgrade in insurance technology services.
When commenting on security, which is always a paramount concern among insurance companies, Mr. Shao Haifeng said that Financial OneConnect focuses on building a platform of fintech services, which provides data encryption to enhance the confidentiality of customers' data, while also providing a two-place/three-center layout for each product to ensure that data is not affected by any unexpected factors. Besides, the Financial OneConnect platform uses a unique data encryption authorization technology with high-performance MAX bottom frame, proving that its security is already in a leading standard among the industry.
Mr. Ye Wangchun, Chairman and CEO of Ping An OneConnect said: 'Smart Insurance Cloud' of Financial OneConnect aims to introduce artificial intelligence in the insurance field to the insurance industry, to help the industry in achieving its smart transformation. In the future, more artificial intelligence insurance products will be shared by Financial OneConnect, thereby accelerating the healthy development of the insurance industry."
Appendix: About Financial OneConnect
Ping An Financial OneConnect is the strategy executor in the Ping An Financial Technology 3.0 era, and is also the platform company to export the fintech capacity of Ping An. Ping An Financial OneConnect began exporting its technology capacity three years ago. Until the first half of 2017, Financial OneConnect had cooperated with more than 400 banks and over 1,500 non-banking-financial and quasi-financial institutions, achieving impressive results in banking and internet loan services.
Financial OneConnect launched its one-stop and all-rounded self-service platform -open.jryzt.com - in May this year, providing important segments such as smart bank cloud, smart insurance cloud, smart big data cloud, smart corporate cloud, AI+, developer center, and demo experience. Being the core carrier that delivers fintech services, open.jryzt.com is able to provide fintech products and services to banks, insurance companies and financial institutions. It offers platform support to technology developers, to jointly innovate fintech products for financial institutions, and to establish an open, cooperative, reciprocal, mutually beneficial fintech eco-system. At present, more than 100 banks and non-bank institutions have completed registration, among which over 20 have signed contracts with open.jryzt.com and over 10 are connected to open.jryzt.com.
