Alipay insurance services platform currently covers over 500 million policy holders. For better and broader coverage, Alipay launches health insurance for the most popular pet species cats and dogs.
Dogs as policy holders? Image credit: Leo Bao/Pexels
On July 20, the Alibaba (BABA:NASDAQ) -affiliated payment platform Alipay announced the intention to share the pet nose print recognition technology on its insurance platform, which will be applied to pet insurance for the first time. China Continent Insurance and ZhongAn Insurance will be the pet insurance underwriters.
For now, pet insurance is to be exclusively applied to pet cats and pet dogs. the Alipay platform will create electronic accounts according to the pet’s nose print, and when the pet owners claim losses, the claim settlement can be finished by nose print recognition. According to the Shanghai Securities News, the success rate of the recognition exceeds 99%. The relatively high recognition rate will bring more application scenarios such as city pet management and pet lost-and-found.
As the Chinese pet market is in a boom, with around 99 million pet cats and dogs, reaching CNY 20 billion in 2019, the demand for pet insurance will likely see a high growth going forward.