Awards for Excellence 2020
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When Euromoney met the head of retail banking at Ping An Bank, Xinfa Cai, in September 2019, he talked of his desire to hear his employer mentioned, in terms of its dedication to innovation and service, in the same breath as the likes Taobao and JD.com, two of China’s biggest and best digitally driven corporates.
A few years earlier, such thinking would have been delusional. Not anymore. Under the leadership of chairman Xie Yonglin, Ping An Bank has disrupted itself, voluntarily and all but completely, from within.
There is so much to mention here, but it’s worth starting with Pocket Bank, Ping An’s digital banking app. Every number in China is big, but the data is still remarkable.
Pocket Bank had 89.5 million customers at the end of 2019, up 43.7% year on year. Of the total, 32.9 million were monthly active users, up 23.5% over the same period. Many banks talk of being tech-driven businesses, but Ping An Bank means it.
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Xie Yonglin |
Everything it does in digital is carefully considered and planned but also imbued with an entrepreneurial spirit. Instead of buying facial recognition technology, Ping An built its own from scratch.
The same is true of its AI platform, which includes a host of valuable natural-language patents. When a customer calls a service centre, the auto-helper adapts its ‘voice’ to mimic the user’s regional accent – to the point where Ping An reckons customers don’t know they are talking to a machine.
This requires huge investment; the bank saw its IT team swell in number by 34% in 2019, with digital expenditure up 36%. But it pays for itself.
Ping An says the amount of revenue generated by each member of staff increased by 17.7% last year and that by making all of its 13 million annual credit card loan collection calls voice-automated, it saves upward of Rmb27 million ($3.82 million). Every little helps.
Then there are the moon-shot ideas that pay off in a big way. In December 2019, a division called OneConnect went public in New York, raising $312 million.
OneConnect counts more than 700 banks and insurers among its customers, delivering digital services that help them to boost revenues and efficiency, and manage risks. Its revenues jumped 64.7% year on year in 2019 to Rmb2.33 billion.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that Ping An Bank is only just getting started.
“We’re hoping to make continuous breakthroughs in digitalization to set a successful example for China and the world’s banking industry,” says Xie.
Ping An is a force to be reckoned with.
