China Insurance Research

The Ant Financial empire just keeps expanding. In the past five years, the Alibaba subsidiary has become China's paramount fintech player, offering a suite of digital financial services from simple online banking to wealth-management services powered by artificial intelligence. Ant is now moving into health insurance with a product that has already signed up 50 million users and is aiming to have 300 million within two years. There's one small caveat, however: Ant says that it's not selling health insurance. To do that, it would need permission from China's regulators. Instead, the product is referred to as "a health aid plan."

Insurtech has grown to be a big part of the Fintech ecosystem. Using technology innovation in order to drive efficiency in the insurance industry to make it more efficient, competitive and millennial-targeted. Advances in technology and data analytics are currently improving and transforming the entire insurance value chain.

During the “Double Eleven” (November 11th) online shopping festival in China, E-commerce companies hit new sales records. However, the winners were not only the E-commerce companies; digital insurance company Zhong’an also claimed victory with over 210 million policies sold with a total coverage exceeding RMB13.3 billion (USD$1.93 billion) across many E-commerce platforms such as Taobao, Tmall, Mogu Street, and Meilishuo.

Zhong’an is probably the most famous digital insurance company in China. Not only because what they do, more interestingly, it is down to the famous background of its shareholders, who are collectively called the Three Ma: Jack Ma of Alibaba, Huateng Ma of Tencent, and Mingzhe Ma of Ping’an.