Ping An Presents Technology Achievements at Goldman Sachs TechNet Conference 2020

Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (hereafter “Ping An” or the “Group”, HKEx:2318; SSE:601318) presented the technology achievements that underpin its “Finance + Ecosystem” strategy at the sixth annual Goldman Sachs TechNet Conference Asia Pacific 2020 on 20 May. The virtual conference featured leading enterprises from around the world in internet, technology and mobile/telecom industries.

Jessica Tan, Co-CEO of Ping An Group said, “The way Ping An became a technology company is different from others. There is one thing unique to us: business use cases. Given the depth and breadth of our offline and online businesses, we can train our technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), on really deep business scenarios. That is our unique advantage versus any other tech company.”

Ping An has made major strides in technology and innovation: it has incubated 11 technology businesses with annual revenues of more than USD11 billion, and established eight research institutes with over 35,000 developers and 2,600 scientists, leading to more than 21,000 technology patent applications. The Group was globally ranked first and second in published patent applications for fintech and healthtech respectively in 2019.

Jessica commented, “Ping An’s philosophy of incubating new business focuses on sectors that are important to consumers and GDP, such as financial services, health care, auto services, real estate services and smart city services. We have focused on these five ecosystems for the last 10 years.”

These ecosystems have established market-leading positions for Ping An in many areas:

• Financial services: OneConnect is a leading technology-as-a-service platform for financial institutions. OneConnect has more than 50 products in 13 end-to-end technology solutions across banking, insurance and investment, serving more than 3,700 financial institutions in China and 10 other countries.
• Health care: Ping An Good Doctor is the largest online health care services platform in China, with more than 315 million registered users, 729,000 daily consultations, and a professional network of more than 3,000 hospitals and 94,000 pharmacies. Ping An Smart Healthcare provides an AI technology platform for more than 14,000 hospitals and 300,000 doctors across 70 cities in China. Ping An HealthKonnect provides social health insurance management in more than 200 cities in China.
• Auto services: Autohome, the largest internet-based auto service platform in China, has more than 40 million daily active users, providing a full-range of auto services with more than 90 car dealers, 27,000 dealers, 30,000 second-hand dealers, and 70,000 repair shops.
• Smart City: Ping An Smart City offers smart city services to more than 115 cities, 500,000 businesses and 50 million citizens. Notable services include Smart Healthcare which now offers the AskBob artificial intelligence-driven clinical decision support system to more than 300,000 doctors in 14,000 medical institutions.

“Ping An takes its technology companies through four stages of development, which allows Ping An to be nimble in managing different companies at different stages without killing them prematurely,” Jessica said. “Stage one is testing value propositions. Stage two, we look at traffic scale. Stage three is the ability to monetize that traffic, which is revenue. Finally, profitability comes at the last stage.”

Since the global outbreak of COVID-19 earlier this year, Ping An has taken on the challenge of meeting changing customer needs. Jessica noted, “The pandemic has forced Ping An to support digital services better than ever.”

Demand skyrocketed for Ping An’s healthtech services. Between 22 January to 10 February 2020, there were 1.11 billion visits to Ping An Good Doctor’s app. Between 22 January to 6 February as the outbreak peaked in China, the number of new registered users increased by 10 times compared with the period from 1 to 21 January, and the number of daily online medical consultations increased by nine times. In Indonesia, GrabHealth – launched in late 2019 by Ping An Good Doctor and ride-hailing company Grab – hired hundreds of doctors as COVID-19 caused demand for online consultations in the country to almost double.

“Business and government needs have also been impacted by the pandemic,” Jessica said. “The COVID-19 situation has forced business and government to accelerate a shift to online services. For example, financial institutions are now more willing to digitalize their process, and in the area of government regulation, social health insurance payments are now starting to be accepted online. Other traditional offline industries are likely to follow.”

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SOURCE Ping An Insurance Group Ltd.