From explosion models to platforms, how does Ant Insurance reimagine the insurance experience for 600 million people?

From return shipping insurance to serving 600 million users.

On October 10th, the Internet insurance platform Ant Insurance announced that the well-known actress Liu Yifei has become Ant Insurance's first global brand ambassador. This is the first time Ant Insurance has used a brand ambassador in its 8-year history, marking a rare high-profile move for the company.

Compared with e-commerce, local life, short video, and other industries, the Internet insurance industry has always been relatively low-profile. In 2010, Alipay teamed up with Taobao to launch return shipping insurance. This pioneering Internet insurance product is now a standard feature in China's trillion-dollar e-commerce market and is also the origin of the Ant Insurance platform.

In 2016, Ant Financial expanded on its original Alipay insurance service and established the internet insurance platform called Ant Insurance. They successively launched popular products such as Good Doctor Insurance, Pet Insurance, Fraud Protection Insurance, and People's Benefit Insurance. Eight years later, Ant Insurance has grown into a one-stop comprehensive insurance platform, covering various types of insurance including health insurance, property insurance, savings insurance, car insurance, and connecting with nearly a hundred insurance companies and 600 million policyholders.

From the launch of freight insurance to the establishment of Ant Insurance, and now with the signing of Liu Yifei hitting hot searches, Ant's insurance business has mostly stayed away from the center of public opinion. Vice President of Ant Group and General Manager of Ant Insurance, Chen Guanhua, told us that insurance is one of the most complex financial products, and engaging in insurance requires sticking to long-termism, sometimes needing to work slowly and meticulously. Ant Insurance and insurance companies have been working together for 8 years, but this is just the beginning of a long journey.

Start with popular health insurance and return to the essence of protection.

After the success of freight insurance, starting around 2012, the Alipay insurance division at that time continued to try out other small innovative types of insurance, such as moon viewing insurance, elder care insurance, and so on. These products gained attention due to the novelty effect, but failed to replicate the market success of freight insurance.

The insurance team has begun to review and reflect, realizing that these innovative types of insurance "deviate from the essence of risk protection" and are not necessarily the most needed form of protection for people. For ordinary individuals, the most urgent need is still health coverage to prevent falling into poverty due to illness. In 2015, the premium scale of commercial health insurance in China was only 241 billion yuan, but the year-on-year growth rate was as high as 52%. Returning to the essence of protection and providing mainstream health insurance for internet users has become Ant Group's new strategy and direction in the insurance sector. In 2016, Ant Insurance Platform was established.

A health insurance broker with over ten years of experience said that online communities mainly consist of young people. It is generally believed in the industry that young people are healthier and have weaker health awareness. Additionally, as they are new to the workforce and have lower insurance budgets, they are not the primary target for offline insurance development.

In 2017, the insurance team of Ant Financial approached Ping An Health Insurance with the hope of jointly developing a health insurance product suitable for the internet-savvy demographic, offering high value for its cost and easy enrollment. After thorough discussions and analyses by both product and actuarial teams, it was determined that under the insurance pricing logic, it is indeed possible to create tailored pricing for online younger customers who are generally healthier.

The product logic is sound, but the polishing process is still not simple. The team at Ping An Health focuses more on risk control and actuarial aspects, while the Ant Financial Insurance team prefers to lower the threshold of protection and expand the coverage in terms and conditions. Xu Weijie, Director of the Ant Financial Insurance Agency Cooperation Department, recalled that the product terms were revised 52 times during the one and a half months of discussion between the two sides.

After a long period of preparation, the first generation of "Good Health Insurance" was launched at the end of 2017. Six months later, the industry's first internet long-term medical insurance product with a promise of 6-year renewal, "Good Health Insurance" version with 6-year renewal, was launched.

Ant Financial's insurance strategy general manager Yan Jie said that a key point of the long-termism in the insurance industry is to provide users with long-term and stable financial products. When the six-year renewal version was launched, most of the related products on the market were "one-year term", making it difficult for users to renew once the product was discontinued. The introduction of the six-year renewal version was a significant breakthrough at that time, which also led to explosive growth in user numbers for the Good Doctor Insurance for the first time.

Two events in 2018 have driven the development of good medical insurance, and even the entire health insurance industry. One is the release of the movie "Dying to Survive", and the other is the widely shared article "Middle-aged in Beijing During the Flu Season" at the beginning of the year. Many young and middle-aged users have realized for the first time that "falling into poverty due to illness" is not a distant issue for ordinary families, and insurance can effectively hedge against this risk.

It was also from Good Doctor Insurance that Ant Insurance truly entered the mainstream insurance category and made a name for itself in the insurance industry. As a milestone, the long-term medical insurance of Good Doctor Insurance evolved from a 6-year renewable policy to a 20-year renewable policy. In 2024, the lifelong renewable version was launched.

Following this, Ant Insurance continues to expand the number of cooperating insurance companies, successively introducing categories such as accident insurance, property insurance, critical illness insurance, life insurance, pet insurance, and auto insurance, basically covering all types of insurance. Official data shows that currently the platform collaborates with as many as 90 insurance companies, offering 1264 insurance products for sale.

From popular single products to comprehensive insurance platforms, Ant Insurance spent six years in this stage.

From choosing for the users, to helping the users choose.

The advantage of being a platform is that it can gather products from all insurance companies, providing users with a wider range of choices. However, new challenges have also emerged.

"The degree of homogenization of products is high, but the standardization level is low." Yan Jie summarized the product landscape of the insurance industry after the diverse development. Taking "Million Medical Insurance" as an example, nearly 200 insurance companies in the market have relevant products, which invisibly increases the cost of choice.

Some insurance products may have potential risks in their underwriting conditions, such as requiring the insured to have no abnormal blood test results within two years - which means even a basic blood routine test for a cold would be considered abnormal. For Ant Insurance, if a product has such unreasonable terms, it should not be recommended to users, regardless of online or offline channels.

Ant Financial's insurance team has decided to establish a mechanism to select products with good product strength, rule out obviously unreasonable products, and lower the threshold for users to choose. Starting in 2021, Ant Financial's insurance has established a "Five-Dimensional Scoring Model" around more than fifty segmented competitive race tracks. All products of each type of insurance need to be automatically scored by the model. The top two or three products with the highest scores will be labeled with the "Gold Selection" mark by Ant Financial's insurance, making it easier for users to identify them.

Yan Jie introduced that in the past, the insurance industry relied more on expert judgment to determine the quality of a product. Ant Insurance for the first time standardized and made transparent the information of insurance products, breaking it down into five dimensions: cost-effectiveness, entry threshold, coverage scope, service claims, and company operations. Subsequently, they established detailed indicators at secondary and tertiary levels layer by layer.

Taking the "million medical insurance" as an example. In terms of the "coverage" dimension, it includes eight secondary assessment indicators such as hospitalization, outpatient services, external drug purchase, health services, and exclusions of liability. Breaking it down to the third level, it also includes at least more than thirty tertiary indicators such as insurance amount, deductible, special outpatient services, and express access for critical illnesses. The team needs to break down each type of insurance like performing surgery, standardize and quantify them, and use models to achieve automatic scoring for more than fifty segmented insurance products.

After JinXuan went online, the cooperating insurance companies also had doubts and challenges. The most frequently asked question was "Why were our products not selected?" Therefore, the strict team gathered cooperating insurance companies, reinsurance companies, insurance experts, and scholars for a "double-blind test", in which the product information of insurance companies was hidden. Experts were asked to rate and rank the products based on five dimensions. Comparing the results from the JinXuan model, the consistency between the "double-blind test" scores and the JinXuan rating results reached 85%.

"The controversies in the insurance industry are often caused by information asymmetry. The work that Ant Insurance does at every step is to communicate information to users as clearly as possible, prioritizing user understanding over sales conversion," said Chen Guanhua.

Claim settlement is a low-frequency process, but it determines the industry's reputation.

Unlike general consumer goods, insurance transactions do not end after being sold. On the contrary, selling is just the beginning of the service, and the claims process is the endpoint of the service. However, the professionalism of insurance claims even surpasses the sales process. Factors such as health disclosure, the level of treatment hospitals, and diagnostic data can all affect the claims results. In the end, some users are able to successfully claim, while others receive notice of denial of claims.

"Insurance, especially health insurance claims, involves a large amount of professional knowledge in insurance and medicine, resulting in natural barriers and gaps in user understanding." said Fang Yong, General Manager of the Product Department of the Ant Insurance Agency and head of Ankang Pei.

For example, the seemingly clear criterion of "secondary or higher-level public hospitals" may have variations in the lists provided by different insurance companies. Many cases on the platform that cannot be compensated for are caused by discrepancies in the nature of hospital grades.

In order to reduce the information gap between insurance companies and users, Ant Insurance has started to focus on improving the claims process and has established a comprehensive service system called "Peace of Mind Claims." For example, by moving claims services to the forefront, they have introduced functions such as "Hospital Check" and "Disease Check," allowing users to know clearly before treatment which hospitals and types of diseases are eligible for claims. The "Hospital Check" function even displays the number of people who have been treated at that hospital and have received claims.

At the same time, make the online claims process as automated as possible. During the submission of claims documents, the claimant uploads photos of all documents, and the "Anxinpei" system will automatically classify and organize them. Taking the Yangtze River Delta region as an example, the "Anxinpei" system has access to government electronic medical bills. Users can authorize the electronic invoices for medical treatment payments in the Alipay app, and then directly select them for upload during the claims process.

In the claims review process, with the help of AI technology, Ant Insurance's online claims service is able to automatically identify 107 types of medical and claims documents, greatly reducing the time for claims review and lowering the insurance company's claims manpower costs. Today, insurance companies that have adopted the "Peace of Mind Claims" product can promise claims efficiency. Outpatient insurance, inpatient medical insurance, accident insurance, and critical illness insurance can each be settled within 2, 4, 5, 15 working days respectively. In 2023, insurance companies have cumulatively paid out 23.1 billion yuan to users through Ant Insurance, with 4.69 million health insurance claims settled.

As a sales platform, Ant Financial Services Group cannot intervene in the claim results of insurance companies, but instead facilitates communication and coordination between users and insurance companies. Ant Financial Services Group provides conclusion interpretation services to clarify any doubts that users may have regarding the claim results of insurance companies.

I'm sorry, but I can't provide images.

Translation: "Screenshot of Liu Yifei's advertisement for Ant Financial."

Also I saw the role played by third-party platforms in the claims settlement process. In 2023, the Zhejiang Banking and Insurance People's Mediation Committee awarded Ant Group with the "Ant Mediation Studio" badge. For extremely complex claims disputes, "people's mediators" will intervene to mediate communication between users and insurance companies, and their mediation conclusions can serve as the basis for judicial enforcement.

It took the Ant Financial team three years to build the current peace of mind insurance service system.

The person in charge of "Anxin Pei" service, Fang Yong, mentioned that the platform's claims service involves a lot of invisible and tiring work. For example, the "hospital check" feature took the team 2 years to accumulate a list of over 100,000 national-level and above medical institutions, continuously maintained, verified, and updated, and then made it freely available to insurance companies and users. "Building this 'hospital database' is not aimed at making a profit, but to make the relevant information of claims services transparent. Engaging in claims mediation is also a long-term endeavor because it is likely to be thankless."

Chen Guanhua believes that the two core aspects of insurance are selection and claims. "Jin Xuan" and "Peace of Mind Claims" maximize the transparency of these two services, effectively avoiding industry challenges such as misleading sales and claims disputes. Both insurance and claims handling are long-term matters that may not take effect immediately, but behind every insurance policy is a family. Many things cannot be rushed and require endurance and resilience to pressure.

Regarding the launch of brand spokespersons, Chen Guanhua said that this is not a method commonly used by Ant Group, but after eight years, the platform's product supply system and professional service system have been established. The cooperation ecosystem with insurers is also becoming more mature. It is time to let more people know about insurance and Ant Insurance through this method. "Ant Insurance's vision is to ensure that every Chinese family has protection. We hope that when people think about buying insurance, they will consider checking out Ant Insurance."

Image source: Ant Bao

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