How Chinese insurer Ping An uses facial recognition to stop its agents skipping meetings

Like many financial companies, Ping An Insurance (Group), mainlandChina』s second largest insurer by premiums, is using face and voicerecognition systems to combat fraud.
But as well as protecting customers from the activities of conartists, the firm is also using the technology to prevent someslightly shady behaviour within its own ranks.

「Before we introduced facial recognition, some agents who didn』tattend the morning briefing would ask their friends to sign them inusing their staff card. Now the agents have to show their face tosign in, so we can make sure all of our 1.4 million agents go towork and attend the briefing,」 said Jessica Tan Sin-yin, deputygroup chief executive.

Ping An』s face and voice recognition systems have accuracy ratesof 99.8 per cent and 99.7 per cent respectively, she said.

The insurer has been making a big push in technology and plansto invest 100 billion yuan (US$15.86 billion) over the next 10years in financial and medical technology, Tan said. It has alreadyinvested 50 billion yuan in the last decade.

「Face and voice recognition can help prevent fraud. In the USand other markets, there are many cases of identity theft wherepeople steal someone else』s identity to borrow loans and thendisappear. These thefts lead to bad debts,」 Tan said.

「Using facial or voice recognitions we can identify ourcustomers and prevent identify theft. It also helps us to identifythose who have bad credit records.」

For customers who worry about privacy issues, they always havethe option of using a password to access to their accounts.

「But for those customers who keep forgetting their password,facial and voice recognitions are making it much easier for them toaccess their bank or insurance accounts,」 she said.

Ping An』s other major technology investment has been in themedical realm. It uses artificial intelligence technology to scanand detect 23 types of disease, with over 90 per cent accuracy. Itis capable of discovering early-stage lung cancer and othercritical illnesses.

「For many critical illness such as cancer, the patients usuallyfind out they have the disease too late. If they can catch it at anearly stage, it would help save a lot of lives,」 she said.

Ping An has already sold its medical systems to mainlandhospitals, and this has now become one of its major businesslines.

Tan said Ping An will continue to seek merger and acquisitionopportunities provided they will increase online traffic and bringin new technology.