Ping An to provide AI technologies to Chinese financial services firms

Ping An Insurance (Group) plans to offer its latest artificial intelligence technologies to other financial services providers throughout mainland China, even before providing them to the company’s own subsidiaries, according to a report by South China Morning Post.

Jessica Tan, chief operating officer at Ping An, said that the strategy would help “level the playing field” by enabling smaller financial services firms to compete against the country’s internet giants.

Following a pilot testing at Ping An-backed peer-to-peer lender Lufax, and at subsidiary Ping An Property and Casualty Insurance Company, Ping An Insurance aims to make its voiceprint recognition system available simultaneously to its call center operation and to other financial institutions.

The plan deviates from the company’s initial strategy for its facial recognition system that was deployed at 17 of its 28 subsidiaries.

Ping An said it expects its voiceprint recognition technology to have a similar impact on the financial industry as facial recognition has had in identifying financial services customers.

Ericson Chan, CEO of subsidiary Ping An Technology, said the company’s facial recognition system, which has a 99.8 percent accuracy rate, allows online loan applications to be verified and processed in three minutes.

Additionally, its subsidiary Pu Hui iLoan uses facial recognition to process about 50,000 applications each day.

“We have used facial recognition in more than 200 scenarios in financial, transportation, residential and government services,” said Chan, adding that Ping An Technology provides cloud and AI services to all group subsidiaries as well as approximately 150 external customers.

Chan said that “democratizing access” to Ping An’s AI technologies and cloud computing services will help generate an even richer set of data that will benefit the group, domestic consumers and the industry as a whole.

Tan said that while the mainland’s internet giants may process larger amounts of data due to their enormous online user base, Ping An “has richer and more accurate data” because of the technologies it deploys and stringent compliance to regulators in the banking, insurance and securities industries.

Earlier this year, Ping An Technology Co. Ltd. achieved a high score in the latest tests conducted by the University of Massachusetts’ facial recognition technology benchmark Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW), scoring a face recognition ratio of 0.9960+/-0.0031.

Article Topics

artificial intelligence  |  biometrics  |  China  |  facial recognition  |  financial services  |  voice recognition