Ant Group has stepped a bit further to achieve transition for its insurance business
Alibaba’s fintech arm Ant Group announced on February 28 that the “Golden Choice” service run by Ant Insurance was officially in operation — in an attempt to make life easier for consumers often burdened by decisions .
The first batch of selected products numbers over 40, ranging from medical insurance and accident insurance to life insurance and critical illness insurance. Several major insurers such as PICC (601319:SH), Ping An Insurance (601318:SH), China Pacific Insurance (601601:SH) and Zhong An Online P&C Insurance (6060:HK) took part in the scheme.
According to Ant Insurance, it has teamed up with actuaries, product researchers and senior insurance product experts to build the Ant Insurance Multi-factors model (AIMM) to devise rules for recommending insurance products in a more transparent manner.
The model rates the products on two main sections (product and company) and 5 dimensions (threshold, coverage, cost-effectiveness, insurer operation, service and claims). By leveraging 851 decision factors and logical algorithms, AIMM will select only the top 10% products under each of the 12 different sub-categories and provides easily accessible evaluation results.
Sources familiar with the matter claimed that the criterion of the “Golden Choice” service will not be linked to sales performance or commissions.
According to Ant, its short-term goal is to build a good insurance model and product evaluation system, and the company expects the AIMM will later play a role in boosting sales and selection.
"As an open platform, Ant Insurance will continue to link up more insurers to introduce quality insurance products for consumers,” said Shao Wenlan, president of Ant Insurance. “[We] will continue to optimize and iterate the ‘Golden Choice’ service with feedback from users and partners.”
Ant Insurance is a comprehensive online insurance agency platform under the Ant Group, which is managed by Ant Insurance Agency Co., Ltd (previously known as Hangzhou Baojin Baoxian Co. Ltd). With the vision of "having every family covered," Ant Insurance has partnered with over 100 insurance companies since its launch, serving a total of over 500 million users.
Ant Group shut down its mutual aid platform, Xianghubao, on December 28, 2021 amid ongoing regulatory headwinds that started in 2021. This followed discontinuation of similar services early last year by peers including Tencent-backed Waterdrop, Chinese food delivery giant Meituan and China’s largest search engine company Baidu.