China’s pre-eminent digital insurer, ZhongAn, is partnering with Japanese insurer Sompo Japan Nipponkoa to enhancing its technical strengths. ZhongAn’s IT platform will help Sompo to customize and localize its insurance offering and Sompo will support ZhongAn to expand in Japan. In addition, both companies will build new customer experiences around for shared services or e-commerce business models.
ZhongAn primarily offers products and solutions in the context of five major ecosystems, namely lifestyle consumption, consumer finance, health, auto, and travel, it is now branching out to serve other insurers with through its subsidiary ZhongAn Tech.
This new partnership aims to build a new business model for the Japanese market by providing new insurance propositions through online channels.
Wayne Xu, ZhongAn’s COO and the Head of ZhongAn International. “In the near future, the focus will be on the Asian region. As a new insurer, we have to understand the users’ needs. By leveraging new technology, we will be able to underwrite a lot of fragmented risks. [Due to automation], most of our products are done within two weeks from design to development to testing to productizing.”
1H’19. The two companies hope to tap into the market that is expected to triple to ¥179 billion (US$1.59 billion) by 2021.
