China’s growing senior population is bringing tremendous business opportunities to the financial services industry, says Michael Guo, Co-CEO of Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd.
According to Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd Co-Chief Executive Officer, Michael Guo, the ageing population in the country has a low awareness of the need to plan ahead financially for senior care. Because of this, senior care services in the China market are fragmented and lack unified standards.
Realising this, Ping An is taking the lead of building an ‘integrated finance + health and senior care’ service system to provide professional financial advisory, family doctor and senior care concierge services.
“China is ageing before becoming rich,” Guo said. “When China entered the phase of an ageing society in 1999, the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was only US$1,000. In comparison, when developed countries in Europe and the US encountered ageing populations, their GDP per capita was approximately US$10,000.”
“This shows that they had stronger financial capacity to support senior care. Today, the challenge in China is that the retirement replacement ratio is low and there is a lack of awareness of the importance of financial planning for senior care,” he explained.
Guo also believes that as average life expectancy increases, people will attach greater importance to pensions and start planning earlier. Hence, the demand for capital preservation and appreciation, with the goal of building a ‘personal pension reserve’, will become the core demand of wealth management.
Integrating Financial Products and Senior Care
Currently, China’s insurance industry is aware of the market opportunities in wealth management for seniors and is working on designing “finance + senior care” products. However, Guo commented that the product types are too generic.
“Fulfilling the needs of seniors cannot be done by simply adding senior care products together, but should be a comprehensive solution, which is organically combined and adjusted to meet the customised demand of the seniors at different stages of their lifecycles,” he added.
For example, seniors who are relatively healthy may want more social interaction, travel, hobbies and learning, to maintain physical and mental health. Seniors with chronic diseases would require appropriate disease management, and for some, disability care services.
To date, China’s senior care and healthcare services sector is still in its early stages, and some of the main challenges include service fragmentation, the uneven quality of services, processes, its costs, as well as a lack of unified standards and service monitoring systems.
Being a senior care insurance solutions provider, Ping An integrates healthcare and senior care services with an aim to meet the different demands of senior customers in health, medication for chronic diseases, and senior care.
Its products also include financial products that offer insurance protection, wealth appreciation, wealth inheritance, and healthcare and senior care services, such as chronic disease management, health management, medical consultations and rehabilitation, residence security, guardianship and entertainment.
“The strength of Ping An lies in its ability to integrate providers into a comprehensive senior care service platform that can meet customers’ personalised needs,” said Guo.
Today in China, 90% of seniors choose home-based senior care. Meanwhile, Ping An’s home-based senior care services include Ping An Health’s online diagnostic platform, which offers 24/7 treatment and consultation services.
It has consolidated extensive offline healthcare service resources, including 100% coverage of the top 100 and 3A hospitals in China, nearly 50,000 in-house and contracted doctors,
about 2,400 partner senior doctors, and 230,000 partner pharmacies. Integrating more than 100 suppliers, the in-home care offers a suite of 650 services and a 24/7 home-based concierge service in 54 cities, with more than 80,000 customers eligible for these benefits.
Technological Empowerment of the Senior Care Industry
Technological empowerment plays an important role in Ping An’s senior care strategy. For example, home-based senior care is supported by an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven concierge.
Currently, AI has been fully implemented in 200 scenarios for online concierge customer interactions and support for human concierges. AI can offer further assistance to efficiently empower homecare workers and nurses, leading to greater efficiency and quality improvements.
“The entire financial insurance industry can leverage its own financial data and combine it with the senior care industry to accumulate data and continue to explore the empowering and enhancing the role of data and technology,” Guo continued.
Another key aspect of technology in senior care is data application. On this, Ping An possesses one of the world’s largest healthcare databases, including a disease database, prescription database, drug database, doctor and hospital database, and personal health database.
The data – sourced from public sources, including the National Health Commission, National Healthcare Security Administration, and National Medical Products Administration – has already been used in scenarios such as health insurance underwriting and claims and assisting users to find information on diseases, drugs, hospitals, and doctors.
