In 2016, CPIC and Huawei launched a finance and insurance solution that was built on an IT infrastructure and big data platform. CPIC quickly set up a Customer Data ATM processing system to mine and analyze hundreds of millions of customer-level data points, including age, education, income, family, and insurance purchase history.
HIGHLIGHTS
In recent years, with the improvement of people's living and income levels, more and more people choose to buy insurance product as a means to manage risk. At the same time, insurance industry is facing new challenges brought by Internet insurance and wider and faster opening-up. With increasing business volume, insurers are now focusing more on their operating costs and efficiency, and traditional insurance companies are looking forward to a "more ideal way to survive."
With the rapid development of mobile Internet, CPIC continuously explores new technologies in business operation efficiency and customer experience. After careful preparation, in 2017 CPIC officially put forward "Digital CPIC" strategy, which is the upgrade version of “Customer-oriented transformation initiative”.
“Digital CPIC” strategy aims to provide products and services based on customers’ needs, develop client end applications, create intelligent technology engine, build business and management sharing platform, and create new tools, areas, and models. In order to implement the "Digital CPIC" strategy as soon as possible and accelerate digital transformation, CPIC is committed to embracing the Internet and integrating new technologies into the financial service sector.
In 2016, the total number of CPIC's customers exceeded 100 million.
For traditional financial services companies, digitalization is neither a label nor a trend, but a key factor that is crucial to the long-time survival of an enterprise. The CPIC digital strategy aims to innovate business models by leveraging technical advantages. CPIC is walking the road to digital transformation, and we’ll continue working with Huawei to provide customers with convenient, high-quality insurance services.
Yang Xiaoling, Chief Digital Officer, China Pacific Insurance Co.
CHALLENGE
In recent years, with the improvement of people's living and income levels, more and more people choose to buy insurance product as a means to manage risk, but the complex attributes of insurance products and tedious insuring process make them daunting. Furthermore, digitalization is changing people's way of life rapidly; traditional insurance marketing methods, such as door-to-door visits, telephone marketing, and face to face selling has been unable to adapt to current consumers' fast-paced lifestyle in the Internet era. People are no longer paying too much attention to insurance terms - they're more willing to pay for their ideal way of life. In the future, insurance industry will have more fragmented long-tail customers, and need to provide scenario-based, personalized and customized service. Therefore, traditional insurance companies need to reconstruct their operational mechanism based on customer behavior and update their business model to encourage innovation and make fundamental changes.
By doing so, they can provide customers with seamless, continuous, one-stop intelligent insurance service through all marketing channels: from inquiry to purchase, from claims to renewal, from complaints to suggestions. At the same time, insurance industry is facing new challenges brought by Internet insurance and wider and faster opening-up. With increasing business volume, insurers are now focusing more on their operating costs and efficiency, and traditional insurance companies are looking forward to a "more ideal way to survive."
SOLUTION
With the rapid development of mobile Internet, CPIC continuously explores new technologies in business operation efficiency and customer experience. After careful preparation, in 2017 CPIC officially put forward "Digital CPIC" strategy, which is the upgrade version of “Customer-oriented transformation initiative”.
“Digital CPIC” strategy aims to provide products and services based on customers’ needs, develop client end applications, create intelligent technology engine, build business and management sharing platform, and create new tools, areas, and models. In order to implement the "Digital CPIC" strategy as soon as possible and accelerate digital transformation, CPIC is committed to embracing the Internet and integrating new technologies into the financial service sector.
As a high-tech giant with technical strengths, Huawei is active in researching, developing, and exploring new technologies. Huawei is an industry-leader in R&D and has cutting-edge tech deployment in cloud computing, big data, and converged communications. It is dedicated to empowering digital transformation for other industries and shares the same business philosophy with CPIC —focus on core business.
With similar development philosophies and the aim to provide customers with better service, CPIC and Huawei signed a strategic cooperation agreement in September 2014. After that, the two companies set up a technology applications lab to explore how new ICT technologies might be used in the insurance business.
In June 2017, Kong Qingwei, Chairman of CPIC and Huawei Founder Ren Zhengfei met in Shenzhen, China and two months later, they met again in Shanghai. They have expressed the intention to fully capitalize on the joint laboratory to unleash the full potential of the two companies’ combined advantages. The shared goal of CPIC and Huawei is to provide consumers with a complete insurance service experience and lead the next growth trend for the insurance industry.
RESULTS
Unlike food, clothing, or housing, insurance isn’t a basic necessity. Thus, traditional insurance industry will always face challenges in marketing. Traditional marketing tactics relied upon personal referrals and door-to-door promotional approaches - neither of which scale efficiently and are better suited to one-time purchases. However, in today’s cloud computing and dig data era, the insurance industry has data advantages. It’s now possible to deeply mine and analyze business data, customer information, and media information to create 360-degree customer profiles. So it is easier to accurately target potential customers and discover a wider range of opportunities by market segment or channel to innovate new products and gain better insights into the dynamics of the insurance market. Markets become more competitive when insurance companies are willing to reshape their business models and service patterns.
In 2016, CPIC and Huawei launched a finance and insurance solution that was built on an IT infrastructure and big data platform. CPIC quickly set up a Customer Data ATM processing system to mine and analyze hundreds of millions of customer-level data points, including age, education, income, family, and insurance purchase history. Based on the results, front-end business applications are fine-tuned to deliver individualized customer insights with a single click. The system supports 4,000 nodes.
In the past, when services for targeted insurance customers needed to be put on hold, the target customer groups had to be selected and extracted from the database manually. This approach was inefficient, time-consuming, and constrained by the minimal concurrency capabilities of systems. Customer service personnel were often unable to fulfill the potential needs of affected customers within a shortened time period. Today, CPIC is making a difference by using open-source Solr and Spark database technologies that provide real-time batch data processing for applications with an average query response time of three seconds. CPIC’s customer service system is built on this platform to support multi-level, multi-dimensional keyword searches that achieve instant results and second-level rendering. These new database technologies are paving the way for transitioning to more intelligent insurance services.
CPIC deployed Huawei’s Enterprise Cloud solution to optimize and upgrade its enterprise cloud. A new hyper-converged architecture that implements Software-Defined Storage (SDS) has greatly improved the response time for CPIC application systems. And to accommodate an expected increase in concurrent access by future customers, CPIC and Huawei have designed and verified a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution for its data center network with good results.
CPIC and Huawei are deepening cooperation in multiple fields, including data center and enterprise cloud construction, big data, artificial intelligence, and digital security. The partners are constructing CPIC’s cloud data center infrastructure, creating innovative industry applications, and improving digital security. They plan to explore and research further innovations for the CPIC cloud, smart customer services, and digital risk control.
