Ping An’s $US 15 Billion R&D Budget Could Help Them Stay Ahead in Healthtech

Ping An Group expects to invest $US 15 billion in technology R&D in the next decade in an attempt to stake out a lead in the financial services industry for next 10 years

Each year the Group invests one percent of its revenue in the R&D of fintech and healthtech. Ping An has invested US$7 billion in R&D in the past decade.

According to the press release, the group has a “finance + ecosystem” strategy, which has so far helped it gain a significant chunk of the industry, particularly in the joint insurtech industry. Besides its own exploits as a group, Ping An is also one of the three key components that makes up ZhongAn.

Their higher investment into innovation and research may be necessary considering its insurance arm’s 7 percent net profit drop as of last October, marking it at 21.3 billion yuan in Q3 that ended in September, compared to its 22.9 billion in the same period of 2017.

Despite this, the group is still focused on maximising its opportunities for growth in the domestic market, with CEO Peter Ma characterising the region as having “the best growth prospects”.

The company’s ongoing strategies will focus on artificial intelligence, blockchain and cloud-based technologies.

This focus so far allowed the company a chance to cooperate with Hong Kong Monetary Authority to create a joint industry standard blockchain-based solution for trade finance. As of July this year, the platform is already functional and has already onboarded multiple banks.

Ping An has also won a coveted award during the 8th Wu Wenju AI Science & Technology award, which is often regarded as one of the highest awards for artificial intelligence in China for its Ping An Brain—a big data AI engine. 

The project, which lasted for approximately three years, launched its Crius smart recommendation system, OLATOP (its cloud-based solution), disease prediction, smart auto-dagame detection, service robots, and other products which were able to combine technological developments with application scenarios which also provided AI products and solutions across multiple fields of its interest.

Featured image via Chris on Flickr