SoftBank leads $1 billion funding of Ping An Group

China’s largest private insurer, Ping An, has announced a recent private financing deal from Japan’s Softbank that relates to three of Ping An’s subsidiaries –

1. Ping An Good Doctor’s pre-IPO financing round during which it raised US$400m

2. Ping An Healthcare Technology completed an A round financing and raised US$1.15bn

3. OneConnect conducted an A round financing and raised US$650m.

Kentaro Matsui, who led the investments by SoftBank Vision Fund has said of this new stake in Ping An, “China is a dynamic and emerging economy with the largest HealthTech market worldwide, and the SoftBank Vision Fund sees tremendous growth potential for this sector. As one of China’s foremost companies, Ping An is a leader in scaling emerging healthcare technologies within an integrated platform.”

According to Ping An, the financing will be used to realize their vision of a two-pronged strategy of “Finance + Technology”. To do this, Ping An has amassed 20,000+ technological R&D staff members, 500+ big data scientists, and filed over 3,000 international and national patent applications and many world-leading technologies in various areas of technological innovation.

The recent financing will be a push Ping An’s two-pronged strategy of “Finance + Technology”, helping them to enhance their technological capabilities and complete their finance and healthcare ecosystems.

About the businesses

• Ping An Good Doctor: This full spectrum health app has over 190m registered users with more than 30m active monthly.

• Ping An Healthcare Technology: This business unit serves Ping An’s entire customer base of 800m people across 70% of the cities in China. It provides comprehensive healthcare and business insurance management services such as expense control service, actuarial services, healthcare insurance account service and medical resources management to over 250 cities.

• One Connect has provided 2,300+ financial institutions (including over 420 banks) with one-stop FinTech solutions so far. Its institutional platform has recorded transactions of more than RMB12tn.

Benefits to customers

1. Improved products and service offerings
2. Increased customer engagement and retention
3. 24/7 real-time availability
4. Flexibility
5. Better decision-making

Benefits to insurers

1. Increased customer reach
2. Increased innovation support
3. Improved customer insight
4. Business Development
5. Optimize the corporate governance

China is at the forefront of preventative healthcare. This latest financing for Ping An will enable it to become even more more customer focused with increased usage of AI, Big Data and cloud technologies. Ultimately, Ping An is continuing its transition away from being a legacy insurer and towards being a significant player in China’s consumer internet space. Specifically, by developing B2C offerings such as Ping An Good Doctor and Ping An HaoFang, Ping An is positioning itself to provide services that are adjacent to the core financial services that Ping An excels at.

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