Micro-facial recognition for bank loans, AI-powered health clinics and algorithms to assess seaside traffic flows. Given some of the things that it now does it would be easy to mistake Ping An for a tech company. Yet as global technology groups such as Amazon and Facebook, as well as China’s Tencent and Alibaba, push from social media and ecommerce into banking and insurance, Ping An is moving in the opposite direction.
Over the past 30 years, chief executive Peter Ma has built Ping An into the world’s biggest insurance company by market capitalisation. It is worth around $170bn, much more than longer established rivals such as Axa, Allianz and AIG. And he has done it almost entirely within the borders of China, where Ping An boasts impressive scale — 1.4m insurance agents, 179m customers growing at a rate of 25 per cent a year, 486m users of its internet services and sidelines in everything from medical diagnostics to wealth management.
That scale has been built on heavy investment in technology. It spends 1 per cent of its revenues on innovation, equivalent to Rmb9.75bn ($1.4bn) last year. It gives Ping An the sort of clout other insurers can only dream of.