Ping An Financial OneConnect launches biometrics-based cloud service for insurers

Ping An OneConnect has launched the Smart Insurance Cloud in Beijing, unveiling its latest products — Smart Verification and Smart Fast Claim — to the insurance industry.

The AI-powered Smart Insurance Cloud features online-to-online interaction capabilities, offering insurance companies smart services and a”flexible access, fast upgrade, self-development, and close follow-through” experience to improve the use of technology in the insurance industry.

Smart Insurance Cloud marks the first public unveiling of Ping An’s core technology for the insurance business.

The company’s Smart Verification function delivers smart innovations to insurers in the areas of policy enrollment, claims, customer services and conservation, as well as provides significant room of growth for the industry for remote, online and mobile services.

Meanwhile, the Smart Fast Claim function delivers over RMB20 billion (US$3.1 billion) revenue for risk leakage control and improves the claims efficiency process by over 40 percent, according to Ping An OneConnect.

More than 10 insurance companies including China Continent Insurance, Sunshine Insurance, Pearl River Life Insurance, Manulife-Sinochem Life and Kunlun Health have signed Letters of Intent with OneConnect.

“Under the guidance of the ‘Internet-plus’ strategy of the country, Ping An continues to advance the building of an open platform,” said Jessica Tan, executive vice president, chief operation officer and chief technology officer of Ping An. “Now, with an industry-wide opening of our platform, we are hoping to help small and medium-sized insurance companies to be connected with the most advanced technology with the lowest cost possible, so as to promote the efficiency, risk control capability, cost control, and customer experience in the overall insurance industry, providing our customers with the ultimate service experience through a combination of insurance and artificial intelligence.”

The Smart Verification function uses AI technologies (face recognition and voiceprint recognition) to create a biological record of each customer, which quickly verifies the user based on their behaviors and attributes.

The technology enables the insurance industry to shift from policy system directly to physical person verification system by combining physical person, physical proof and policy. In doing so, the technology solves the ongoing issues of being unsafe, inconvenient and not worry-free in the insurance industry.

In addition, it will significantly reduce potential disputes stemming from the policy selling process.

Ping An’s smart verification has helped decrease the new policy surrender rate to 1.4 percent, which is well below the industry average of 4 percent.

Additionally, the technology has shortened the time taken for a policy enrollment by 30 times, time taken for audio and video recording reduced by 75 percent, and increased quality control success rate by 65 percent.

The “difficult to claim” problem was improved significantly by the physical person verification technology combined with online intelligence. Processing time has been shortened from three days to 30 minutes, resulting in increased customer satisfaction as well as doubling the coverage increase rate.

Smart verification technology could cover more than 90 percent of the insurer’s customer service.

Ping An emphasizes that the applications of smart insurance cloud are not limited to the insurance sector, as the smart verification technology can be applied to all scenarios involving physical person verifications, such as opening a bank or securities account.

The Smart Fast Claim function contains high-precision image recognition, delivering smart recognition accuracy up to 90 percent or more of car models, exterior parts and 23 damage levels.

The function’s immediate one-click damage identification capability allows insurers to use real-life claim images as training samples. The insurance firm can automatically determine the amount of damage based on the appearance of the vehicle exterior using smart machine learning and algorithms and uploading an image to assess the price of maintenance proposal in a few seconds.

In addition, Smart Fast Claim enables insurers to achieve accurate prices of automotive parts in various provinces and municipalities by generating prices through the main machine factor, the data collected among nine data collection sites or production data generation.

Finally, the smart risk control feature helps insurers reduce cost of claims through the risk library from undertaking an insurance to filing claims, application of logical regression, random forest and other machine learning and algorithms, developing more than 30,000 digital claims and risk control regulations, covering all claims processes of “individual” or “group” risks, and following up with smart lock of risks, smart interception and post-event smart screening.

Just last month, Ping An Insurance (Group) Co announced it will make a more than 7.77 billion yuan ($1.16 billion) investment on technology R&D this year, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence (AI).

Article Topics

biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  insurance  |  KYC  |  OneConnect  |  PING AN Tech  |  voiceprints