Ping An’s journey to scale

The Chinese financial conglomerate Ping An has expanded beyond its roots as a property and casualty (P&C) insurer into a broader set of ecosystems, such as banking, healthcare, smart cities, and housing.

In the past five years, Ping An has accumulated over 500 million online users, created 11 new digital platforms across industries, and increased its number of insurance agents to 1.4 million, all armed with the company’s digital tools and apps.

Ping An’s commitment to investing in emerging technologies has been a particularly important driver of this expansion: it now directs 1 percent of its annual revenue—around $1 billion—toward tech investment.

I recently sat down with Jessica Tan, Deputy Group CEO of Ping An, to discuss a range of topics, from their approach to investing in technology, to how they cultivate a culture of innovation, to their highly successful ecosystem strategy, to their success at incubating several unicorns.

Over the next several days, I’ll be posting short video clips from my interview with Jessica, starting with this first clip in which she talks about Ping An’s 30-year journey from its roots as a 13-person P&C insurer, to the diversified and highly profitable provider of financial services that it has become today.

The following has been lightly edited for clarity and length:

Joe Ngai: So Jess, thank you very much for the interview.

Jessica Tan: Good to see you!

Joe: Yes! It has been 30 years for Ping An. You just celebrated your 30th. It has been an incredible story from where you started until now. Maybe you can bring us through a little bit about the development of Ping An from a small P&C insurer into what it is today. What are the moments, what are the developments, what’s the story?

Jessica: Yeah. So, it's really been an exciting 30 years. Peter, our founder who is still our chairman and the CEO, has been absolutely remarkable in the full 30 years. In the first 10 years we were really, as you pointed out, a P&C insurer. We started with 13 people and with really nothing,. And it really grew in the first 10 years in insurance.

The second 10 years was really expanding from insurance to the rest of financial services. We built our bank over 14 years by acquiring three different banks.We had our trust company and securities company to become what we are today. And then in the last ten years, we've been very interested in basically investing in finance and technology.

We really believe that financial services, as it continues to evolve, is increasingly reliant on technology. And so, 10 years ago, Peter started to take a percentage of our revenues every year to invest in technology, and not only for us. We started to export it and share it with the rest of the marketplace.

So, we see the next 10 years as what we call finance and ecosystem, where we will grow not just through finance, but we will take our technology through various ecosystems to the rest of the market. And eventually, we'll be a finance and technology company.

Joe: Of course, one of the key strengths that you guys are relying on is your scale. So, maybe it reminds us a little bit around the number of customers. When you invest in technology, you can leverage it across a lot of customers, a lot of channels, a lot of agents, what are we talking about?

Jessica: I come from Singapore. Everything in China is really big compared to Singapore. We're about a trillion US dollars in asset size. And then our revenue is about a trillion RMB across the group and a hundred billion RMB in profits. In terms of operational scale, we will reach about 500 million internet customers soon.

Joe: 500 million.

Jessica: 500 million. Actually, we're preparing to celebrate the 500-million mark likely at the end of this month, of which 166 million are actually our financial services customers.

And every day, we have about 80,000 contact center agents and 1.4 million dedicated agents on the ground. These are all our sales and service channels. Which is why I think it's very important that we need to have a seamless technology platform to ensure that we really deliver what we say. Because our motto, Peter has always said, is one customer, multiple products, one account, and one self-service.

Since, I think, 2006, we've been zealously trying to do that, and without technology across such a big scale and touch points it’s impossible for us to do that.

Thank you for reading (and watching)! Please follow me for more clips from my interview with Jessica.