(Hong Kong, Shanghai, 11 November 2020) Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (hereafter “Ping An” or the “Group”, HKEX: 02318; SSE: 601318) announced that Ping An Property & Casualty was named "Digital Insurer of the Year" by Insurance Asia News in their Awards for Excellence 2020.

The judges noted Ping An Property & Casualty’s “groundbreaking initiatives” in artificial intelligence, telematics, image recognition and big data, which support innovations such as online claims and smartphone services. Ping An Property & Casualty’s technological leadership also enabled its 47,000 staff to work seamlessly from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, proving “the firm’s own internal technology has been well wired and staff well trained to deliver results even in the most difficult of circumstances.”

Leading digital transformation in property and casualty insurance

With the rapid development of information technology such as big data and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the acceleration of digital transformation in the insurance sector is a necessity. Ping An Property & Casualty’s new vision to be a world-leading technological, data-driven property and casualty insurer has driven its increasing investment in scientific research. Ping An Property & Casualty has recruited overseas and domestic technological talent, reshaped itself into an agile organization and is progressively building data-driven capabilities, including cloud computing, big data, AI and mobile applications. It has also intensified the data-driven construction of various businesses and enhanced its core competitiveness.

Embarking on a comprehensive technology and data-driven transformation

In 2020, Ping An Property & Casualty has embarked on a comprehensive data-driven transformation with data being utilized through informatization and online operations. It has built a smart services and management platform connecting front, middle and back-office systems. Its digitally driven marketing, pricing, processing, risk control, claims services and operations have enhanced customer experience and operational efficiency.

Specifically, in terms of smart processing, Ping An Property & Casualty offers customized auto insurance applications and precise product portfolio recommendations to customers within seven seconds, using AI image categorization and optical character recognition (OCR) technology. The AI applications have enabled the robotic process automation of tasks including quotation, policy issue and endorsement for customers’ convenience. In the retail auto insurance business, over 90% of quotes are made automatically. As no manual data entry is required, the turnaround time from quotation to policy issue is as short as 20 seconds.

Ping An Property & Casualty introduced smart claims services, “One-click Claims Services”, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Users can click “Online Reporting” in the “Ping An Auto Owner” app after traffic incidents, upload images of the damage and the AI smart loss assessment robot will automatically evaluate repair solutions and costs. Users can confirm the claim and the amount can be transferred instantly using face recognition. The utilization rate of the function is currently at 87.93%.

Ping An Property & Casualty’s self-developed core OCR and AI-powered smart image-based loss assessment technologies have laid a solid foundation for a data-driven system. In particular, Ping An’s OCR defeated over 100 international and local participants to take the top ranking in the Robust Reading Challenge on 2019 Scanned Receipts Optical Character Recognition and Information Extraction (SROIE).