Ping An Group   

About Ping An Group

Founded: 1988

Began as an insurance company in China; now, a China headquartered holding company with assets spanning across insurance, banking, healthcare and technology verticals.

200M customers across product lines.

Fun fact – Recently committed $15bn over the next decade towards technology investment.

In this blog I will cover:

• 5 ecosystem strategy
• Highlights of Q3 financial results
• Ping An goes global
• What can we learn from Ping An Group?
• In-house technology to SaaS; an emerging trend

5 ecosystem strategy

Ping An’s ecosystem approach can be split into five categories: [1]

• Healthcare
• Auto
• Financial
• Smart home
• Home

In this blog, I will focus on the Healthcare,  Auto and Financial aspects of the 5 ecosystem strategy; this blog will provide a high level overview rather than a deep dive.

Healthcare

Ping An Good Doctor

• Hong Kong listed
• 62.7M MAU (Monthly active users) and 2.3M MPU (Monthly paying users) as at 30/06/2019 [2]
• Good Doctor partnered with SE Asian super app GrabPartnership with Grab announced – August 2018 [3]
  • Launch of Grab Health in Indonesia – 23/10/2019 [4]

AI powered smart clinic – China [5]

• Dubbed as “one minute” clinics
• Aims to reduce check-up waiting times from 3 hours to 8 minutes.

Auto

Autohome

• One stop shop for all motor related needs.
• NYSE listed
• Ping An holds 53.9% stake [6] [7]
• 38.8M DAU as of 30/06/2019 [8]
• $116M Net profit for Q2 ‘19

Ping An Auto Owner app

• 20M MAU; 80M total downloads
• 45M motor insurance customers have the app downloaded.
• AI based damage self-assessment tool has 95% accuracy.

Financial

Lufax       

• Wealth management and retail lending platform
• $4.96bn in retail AUM
• Ping AN Group holds 41% stake; private valuation of $39.4bn [9]

OneConnect

• Ping An’s technology arm; beyond China, forays into SE Asia and EU
• 618 banking clients; 84 insurance clients
• Previous round valuation – $7.5bn; expected to IPO in Hong Kong [10]

Highlights of Q3 financial results

• Acquired 29.72M new customers in ’19
• 39% of whom came from users within the 5 ecosystems.
• 10% increase in app user base to 594M
• P&C business recorded 75.5% YoY increase in Operating Profit

Ping An goes global with OneConnect

Hong Kong forays

• Launched eTradeConnect – blockchain based supply chain platform for HKMA in October ‘18 [11]
• Acquired virtual bank license from HKMA in March ‘19 [12]

EU expansion

• Finleap Connect; OneConnect JV with FinTech venture builder Finleap – August ‘19 [13]
• Select EU investments by Global Voyager Fund include Finleap, Joonko. [14]

PING AN GLOBAL VOYAGER FUND INVESTMENTS

$1 bn fund; 9 public investments; roughly $200M+ committed

What can we learn? And, who is learning?

#1: Upstream value capture

Ping An examples – Autohome investment and Good Doctor launch.

“Fast followers”:

Acko Insurance (India) acquired Vler Technologies – June ‘19 [15] (Closely resembles Ping An’s acquisition of Autohome.)

Policybazaar (India) launched DocPrime in ’18 [16]; SBVF portfolio synergy through Good Doctor investment

#2: Partnerships with tech companies

Ping An example – ZhongAn (JV with Tencent and Alibaba); HK IPO exit in Sept ‘17 [17]

“Fast follower”:

Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance (South Korea) partners with Kakao to launch a non-life digital insurance company – October ‘19 [18]

In-house tech to SaaS: Is this a new trend?

Ping An example: OneConnect (FinTech arm) once built technology for in-house use, but, has now licensed its technology throughout Asia.

Examples from the wider industry:

ZhongAn Technology (established 2016) by ZhongAn Online as a SaaS provider of FS related technologies[19];notable partnership with Grab for online insurance marketplace – Jan ’19 [20]

Trov (USA based InsurTech) “pivoted” (*) from D2C to B2B2C (SaaS model); notable partnership with LBG [21]

I think pivot is the wrong phrase here; it is an incredibly intelligent move to iterate on a proposition by being consumer facing (D2C) and then “transfer learnings at a premium” (KTP model) to corporates who cannot do the former.

Some questions for you to think about

• Do you think other insurance companies can replicate Ping An’s strategy?
  • Think about what AXA is doing with AXA Next, AXA Venture Partners and Kamet in Europe

• What do you think about insurance companies (and intermediaries) moving upstream by owning auto marketplaces and healthcare platforms?
  • Think about Acko owning VLer and Policybazaar launching DocPrime

• What are the implications of Ping An looking Westward?
  • OneConnect has the potential to offer bank-as-a-service (similar to 11FS Foundry and Starling Bank) whilst partner Finleap has built a fully digital insurance company – Element Insurance (Germany) that is operational!

About the author

• Rahul is the Cohort & Communications lead at Accenture’s FinTech Innovation Lab in London.
• Prior to joining Accenture, he was an Insurance Product Manager at Laka Insurance, a London headquartered early stage InsurTech start-up which recently won at the British Insurance Awards 2019.
• Rahul holds a master’s degree in Statistics from the University of Warwick.
• He is an Ambassador at the Asia InsurTech podcast; reach out via LinkedIn or Twitter.