(Hong Kong, Shanghai, 30 August 2019) Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (hereafter “Ping An” or the “Group” or the “Company”, HKEX: 2318; SSE: 601318) announced that at the opening ceremony of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2019 in Shanghai, Ping An was the only financial services company among 10 other selected institutions awarded by the Ministry of Science and Technology to develop the National Open Innovation Platform for Next Generation Artificial Intelligence.

At Ping An Group, this initiative will be led by affiliate Ping An OneConnect. Ping An OneConnect will use Ping An’s rich experience in the personal financial services industry to establish an open platform to help provide solutions at national level to fulfill identified needs in the consumer Puhui Finance sector using Ping An OneConnect’s unique technology+ business, dual empowering model. The platform aims to focus on the needs of various financial institutions in the sector and help them build standard services and risk management modules to better serve target customers.

Jessica Tan, Group Co-CEO of Ping An, said, “As a comprehensive financial enterprise established for 31 years, Ping An has cultivated a number of innovative technologies and achievements in recent years under its finance + technology and finance + ecosystems strategies, which are based on three core technologies of AI, blockchain and cloud. Ping An has the ability to promote the development of the Puhui Finance sector.”

Through technology empowerment, scenario development and insertion, capital support and an all-rounded cooperation model, Ping An will gather industry innovation and provide project development recommendations, incubation support, entrepreneurship training and other services for AI innovation enterprises. Ping An will support the development and building of a comprehensive Puhui Finance AI open platform; integrating government, industry, education and research. This initiative may increase China’s AI competitiveness through specialized talent training and development.

There are now 15 companies on the National Open Innovation Platform, including Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, each of them is leading different topics and the panel is of high reputation. In the current announced batch, besides Ping An, nine other companies will be leading on nine other different development topics, including Underlying Software and Hardware (Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.), Smart Residence (‎Beijing Xiaomi Mobile Software Co., Ltd.) and Image and Vision Computing (Shanghai Yitu Network Technology Co., Ltd.).