Text/Chen Kai *
Judging from the development trend of e-commerce thinking, the insurance industry is one of the earliest industries in China to try the Internet. Since around 2000, Taikang Life Insurance and other major domestic insurance companies have started to establish their own online insurance sales channels, and the framework of insurance e-commerce has basically taken shape. However, at that time, the structure of insurance e-commerce was still incomplete, lacking convenient payment channels, and online information needed offline business assistance.
Today, Internet finance is booming. Can the insurance industry seize the opportunity of online consumption and mobile payment again, achieve a breakthrough in the whole industry and establish a marketing channel that it can control?
The internet process of insurance industry
At present, the online sales model of the insurance industry includes insurance companies' own sales websites and product sales through internet e-commerce and social platforms. However, compared with the third-party sales platform with huge traffic base, the online sales channels built by insurance companies lack continuous customer stickiness and attractiveness.
But it is undeniable that insurance e-commerce has a lot of room for development. Iresearch predicts that the online premium income of China insurance e-commerce market will reach 59.05 billion yuan in 20 16, and the penetration rate will reach 2.6%.
From 2000, major domestic insurance companies set up their own online insurance sales channels, forming the basic framework of insurance e-commerce, to 20 13 "Sanma" insurance sales model, which catalyzed the further networking of insurance e-commerce, the development of insurance e-commerce showed three main stages.
In the first stage, the concept of online sales insurance started, the insured filled in and submitted the information online, and the offline salesman came to the door with the information for business promotion. Taikang Life Insurance, China Ping An, Pacific Insurance and China PICC have established e-commerce websites and launched online sales products. However, the actual effect is not obvious, because the insurance products at that time were still high-threshold family financial management, and the general consumers were more cautious. In addition, the online experience lacks key payment links, and the business model has not fundamentally changed.
In the second stage, with the maturity of online banking and third-party payment technology and the implementation of electronic signature law, online insurance product sales have a perfect transaction structure and online legal protection. At the beginning of April 2005, the first full-process electronic insurance policy in China was officially released in Beijing, and the "first order" was signed. The so-called whole process, that is, all the operations of the whole policy can be realized on the Internet. According to statistics, by the end of 20 1 1, there were 36 insurance companies in China, accounting for 23% of the total number of insurance companies.
The third stage is the era when Internet thinking began to influence and change many traditional industries. The financial industry has begun the process of internet, and the insurance industry has really ushered in a broader space. In 20 13, Zhongan Online Property Insurance was established, and the mode of "Sanma" selling insurance once again ignited the market's enthusiasm for insurance e-commerce. It has become the choice of most insurance companies to jointly sell insurance products with high-flow platforms such as e-commerce. Although offline sales still occupy an absolute advantage at present, no one wants to give up this rich online market in the future.
Taikang e-commerce: "full process, multi-platform, borrowing traffic"
In the insurance industry, Taikang Life Insurance was the first to accept the impact of Internet thinking. As early as 10 years ago, it tried to use the Internet to transform its business model. In September 2000, Taikang Life Insurance launched Taikang Online and launched online insurance service. The concept of "online insurance" was first put forward in China, and it was quickly copied by other insurance companies.
Subsequently, after entering the last two stages of insurance e-commerce, Taikang Life began to combine the characteristics of each stage and make more Internet attempts.
In June 2008, e-commerce of Taikang Life Insurance entered a new stage. Whether it is Taikang online platform, cooperation with other large domestic companies, or constantly enriched product system, it is developing rapidly.
As an insurance company that integrated Internet payment earlier, Taikang began to integrate fast third-party payment into its own business when the development of insurance e-commerce entered the second stage, so as to improve the transaction process and provide a better user experience. In 2009, Kuaiqian, a third-party payment platform, reached an all-round cooperation with Taikang Life Insurance to provide comprehensive payment services for Taikang. Users can buy insurance for children, women, medical care, old-age care, major diseases and accidental injuries directly through quick money on Taikang website. Subsequently, Taikang continuously expanded its cooperation with other third-party payment to provide users with a more convenient payment interface. In April of the same year, Taikang Online cooperated with Sina, the largest portal website in China, to build the first financial and insurance supermarket in China. In July of the same year, we cooperated with Ctrip.com, the largest business e-commerce company in China, to sell aviation insurance, and provided customers with timely and convenient services with standardized management and powerful technology; In June of the same year, 5438+065438+ 10 cooperated with Taobao, the largest C2C platform in China, to provide professional insurance services for online consumers through online flagship stores.
In 20 10, Taikang Online's three product systems, e- Ai Jia long-term life insurance, e- shun short-term accident insurance and e- wealth management investment and wealth management products, were formally formed, including investment-linked insurance, universal insurance, accident insurance, tourist visa insurance, health medical insurance, children's insurance and women's insurance. Because it is sold directly through official website, the intermediate agent link is omitted, and at the same time, it is sold in combination with various insurance responsibilities, so the price is very favorable. The most commendable thing is that Taikang also protects the content and amount of protection for the insured by DIY on demand, realizing "my insurance is my master" and providing consumers with more humanized products and services. After two rounds of revision, the number of hits of Taikang Online in 20 10 increased by 40.3% year-on-year, and the number of independent visitors to the website increased by 60% year-on-year.
Now, insurance e-commerce has entered the third stage of rapid development. While improving the online e-commerce transaction process, Taikang Life Insurance actively opened up multi-faceted product marketing channels such as Taikang APP, Taikang Weibo, Taobao Wealth Management Channel and WeChat platform.
Taikang's insurance e-commerce model can be summarized by several key words: "full process, multi-platform, borrowing traffic". In the development process of traditional insurance industry, due to the lack of stickiness of its own platform, it is necessary to use the Internet platform with frequent transactions, high stickiness and high traffic to increase product sales, which is "multi-platform, borrowing traffic". The "whole process" is to improve the transaction structure of its own platform and enhance the user experience through grasping customer needs, matching products and optimizing the transaction process of its own website.
Insurance e-commerce needs to rely on customers and traffic to break through.
It should be acknowledged that the insurance industry combines the Internet and e-commerce thinking to carry out industry transformation, which caters to the future consumption trend and has obvious advantages. It can not only improve the user experience and reduce the customer's choice cost, but also reduce the insurance company's own offline cost and improve the profit space.
The data shows that the online sales cost of insurance companies mainly includes backup support cost, network communication cost, policy delivery cost, document cost and equipment depreciation. , the overall cost rate is about 12%. If the electronic insurance policy is used, the policy delivery fee and document fee are exempted, and the expense rate can be reduced to 10%. However, the expense ratio of personal agency channels of insurance companies is usually around 30%, which is 2.3 times that of online sales channels. The expense of agency channels of other banks and offline third-party wealth management may be higher. Therefore, insurance e-commerce is revolutionary for traditional insurance.
Of course, the reason why insurance e-commerce has never been able to establish an online channel with extensive influence independent of third parties is also related to the disadvantages of insurance itself. Especially when 20 13 internet finance emerged, insurance products were mostly term products, and their liquidity was not strong, so they failed to open the gap with the online wealth management and P2P industries represented by Yu 'ebao, which failed to attract more investors' interest. In addition, the demand for insurance products is not normal, but one-off or phased, unlike e-commerce and payment platforms, which have a large number of daily trading and use needs, so they do not have high user stickiness.
If insurance e-commerce wants to have more customer traffic, it must use the traffic of other e-commerce, social networking and payment platforms to realize the sales of insurance products; At the same time, we should make a better product portfolio and optimize the trading experience of our website platform.
* The writer is an Internet finance analyst at Shanghai Rongzhidao Investment Management Consulting Co., Ltd.
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