经济学人下载:平安--变形计(3)

Ping An is also becoming better at the lucrative business of "cross-selling", or selling customers more products from other parts of the group, which increases income without incurring the cost of acquiring new clients. The share of retail customers that have contracts with more than one subsidiary rose from around 19% in 2015 to about 37% in June. That puts Ping An about 20 percentage points above the average cross-selling rate for insurers in Asia, according to Bain, a consulting firm. 

平安保险在利润丰厚的“交叉销售”业务方面也做得越来越好，即向客户销售集团其它部门的更多产品，从而在不增加获取新客户成本的情况下增加收入。与一家以上子公司签订合同的零售客户份额从2015年的19%左右上升到6月份的37%左右。据咨询公司贝恩称，这使得平安保险的交叉销售比率比亚洲保险公司的平均水平高出约20个百分点。

None of this would be possible without Ping An's technological prowess—the third and by far most important ingredient of its success. AI allows cross-selling pitches to customers to be made when they are most useful, for instance. "The final sale is done by an agent but the system develops the recommendation," says Henrik Naujoks of Bain. "And it's done at the right time." 

如果没有平安的技术实力，这一切都不可能实现。技术实力是其成功的第三个因素，也是迄今为止最重要的因素。例如，人工智能能够在最有用的时候向客户进行交叉销售。贝恩公司的亨里克·诺约克斯表示：“最终的销售会由中介完成，但系统会发展推荐，而且会在最合适的时候。”

Large banks and insurers often sponsor "fintech incubators" that develop new technologies, or buy in applications that can be patched on to their core operations. HSBC, for instance, hired Identitii, an Australian fintech, this year to build a digital-payments tool. But for regulatory reasons such experiments tend to be ring-fenced from the financial institution. 

大型银行和保险公司经常赞助开发新技术的“金融科技孵化器”，或者购买可以修补到其核心业务上的应用程序。例如，汇丰今年聘请了澳大利亚金融科技公司Identitii打造一个数字支付工具。但出于监管方面的原因，此类实验往往会受金融机构的限制。

Ping An, by contrast, has fully internalised these operations, apparently unafraid of regulatory blowback. The group has a 110,000-strong technology development team—larger than the commercial-banking divisions of all but the biggest banks—including 3,000 scientists. It submitted 4,625 technology patents in the first half of the year alone. The tools developed within the group's technology unit are often used across the company. These include creditrisk models that use vast stores of data to make quick lending decisions at Ping An's consumer-finance division, Puhui. Similar data crunching can track a customer's driving habits through movements detected on a mobile-phone sensor and price car insurance accordingly. More accurate pricing on both fronts saves the company money. 

相比之下，平安已将这些业务完全内部化，显然它并不惧怕监管方面的反弹。该集团拥有11万人的技术开发团队，其中包括3000名科学家，这个团队比除最大的银行外的所有商业银行部门都要大。仅在今年上半年平安就提交了4625项技术专利。该集团技术部门开发的工具通常会在整个公司内使用，其中包括信用风险模型，该模型利用大量数据存储，在平安旗下的消费金融部门“普惠”快速做出放贷决定。类似的数据处理可以通过手机传感器检测到的移动情况跟踪客户的驾驶习惯，并相应地为汽车保险定价。更准确的定价在这两个方面节省了公司的资金。