Under the auspices of its Asia’s Innovation Resource Platform (AIRP), 36Kr Global aims to accelerate the development of cross-border economic flows and help industry stakeholders explore business opportunities with each other.
On September 29, AIRP, together with Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB) and FWD Group, the insurance business of Pacific Century Group, organized the third installment of the Bespoke Innovation Webinar 2020 to digital transformation and applications of insurance technology. The forum focused on 4 topics, namely applications of robotic technology, talent management, health insurance, and insurance technology. Speakers included Qibao Technology, Bello, theCareVoice, Doubao.com, and Easitech.
Discussions have been adapted and translated for public release.
Insurance robots and corporate labor cost
Qibot is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company operating within the insurance space. Its self-developed robot, Aimi, can read and understand terms and conditions of insurance products on offer, and also answer customer questions on insurance in a professional manner. Aimi has an excellent understanding of semantic nuances and can discern the intention from different speech patterns, and not only this can understand English, Cantonese, and Mandarin, among other dialects. It can communicate with customers by text or as a virtual voice-based AI assistant.
Aimi is also capable of optimizing sales, to handle the underwriting, and claims processes. With this under its belt, Leon Zhang, Qibot’s solution expert and overseas marketing manager shared that the company is actively making plans to expand in overseas markets.
Zhang also highlighted that since its establishment in 2016, Qibot has built a natural language processing (NLP) engine and medical graph based on its own algorithms. Therefore, insurance institutions who purchase its products don’t need to invest massive amounts of manpower or time to train its robot and only have to provide information such as product and service terms. Project delivery can be completed within a few weeks or even within a week.
AI technology and talent management
Bello is an AI company that provides talent management enterprise solutions by applying natural language processing (NLP) technologies, workplace knowledge graphs (KG), and recruitment process automation (RPA) technologies.
Despite the rapid growth of China’s AI industry, the penetration rate of talent-management related technologies is still relatively low. In 2019, only 6% of companies applied AI or big data technologies in recruitment. But in contrast, over 70% of companies plan to introduce such technologies in the next two to three years, suggesting that this market has huge potential.
Bello uses RPA technology to complete large scale, repetitive, and time-consuming transactional tasks. Aside from saving on headhunting costs, this also allows manpower to be allocated to high-value tasks such as precision communication and later-stage interviews, which improves the efficiency of the entire recruitment process. Bello’s core technologies, such as parsing products and position-applicant matching, are aimed at large companies that have high recruitment requirements—at the moment, it counts behemoths such as Tencent, Ping An, and ByteDance among its customers.
In response to questions from FWD and EDB, Bello discussed how the geographical location of their customers affected the accuracy of language processing in candidates’ resumes. Bello believes that its technology is equally effective for both Chinese and English resumes, and even if customers have business operations in overseas regions such as Southeast Asia, they can use these products to optimize resume screening and talent management.
Artificial intelligence opens up opportunities for health insurance
Health insurtech company theCareVoice has developed rapidly over the past 5 years, and recently, launched its first medical and health industry operating system. This operating system helps insurance companies create customized, high-performance, and user-friendly health insurance solutions, and importantly, helps them realize the overarching aim of making health insurance more humane. As a partner to over 20 insurance companies such as Ping An Health, XA, and Zhongyi, theCareVoice has generated positive results for insurance sales, user retention, and cost control performance indicators. theCareVoice is also committed to providing customers with value-added services that meet the needs of specific groups of people, which can help insurance companies develop tailor-made and more competitive products.
Co-founder and CBO, Jan Velich, introduced CareVoiceOS, and highlighted how care and treatment are two core sectors that the CareVoice focuses on in order to provide users with one-stop health insurance and seamless experience. This system can be flexibly embedded within each insurance company’s app or WeChat service platform, such as providing services for pre-diagnosis, locating suitable hospitals, making appointments, and policy management.
In Q4 2020, Velich raised that theCareVoice would be focusing on developing StartupCare, an enterprise-level digital health management solution for Singapore. theCareVoice is currently working with Malaysia’s GHL Group Berhad, a payment service provider, to accelerate business expansion throughout Southeast Asia. There are plans to replicate its experience serving health insurance products in mainland China and Hong Kong to the rest of Southeast Asia as well.
A new model of customer service
Doubao.com’s CTO, Sun Ziyi, shared that in the future, Doubao hopes to rely on its Hong Kong subsidiary, EasiTech, to promulgate better insurance technology products and services to Southeast Asia and new global markets. Doubao’s core value lies in linking product development, sales channels, business performance analysis, cloud services, RPA technologies, artificial intelligence, and data analysis. This helps to create services for the insurance industry. Doubao’s independently developed AI engine can also help calculate complex premiums, match products, and analyze user demand gaps to improve the performance of insurance companies and their agents.
Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, more consumers have begun to obtain insurance services online. Doubao and EasiTech ca help insurance companies better interact with their end consumers through B2B2A2C mobile solutions. Mobile solutions can also smoothen communications internally between supervisors, professional agents, and logistics staff. According to Doubao, conversion rates for insurance institutions that deployed digital systems increased by an average of 132% in the first half of 2020 year-on-year. In Q4 2020, EasiTech’s CEO Wendy Zhang also indicated that it would continue to upgrade its EasyI development marketing tool V2.0, which assists insurance sales representatives in meeting the demands of insurance institutions.
36Kr Global’s cross-border innovation team, AIRP, will be organizing further sharing sessions with Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB) and other large Singaporean companies. Stay tuned for more updates!
About 36Kr Global AIRP
Asia has surpassed other regions to become the largest economy in the world. As mentioned, each region has its advantages and characteristics. We have observed an increasing number of big corporates deploying their innovation strategies without geographic limitation and trying to find best-fit solutions across regional markets like China, SEA, India, and Japan. However, it is challenging for corporates to reach outside of the organization to scout for technology and collaboration partners.
AIRP (Asia’s Innovation Resource Platform), a cross-border consulting team under 36Kr Global, has been committed to connecting large enterprises and start-ups in various regions, helping them realize innovation transformation and finding potential partners. Whether you are a large enterprise or a startup, if you are interested in being part of our network or have any enquiries about AIRP, reach us at partnerships@kr-asia.com!
