At the beginning of this year, Tencent Financial Cloud was born. Then, China Ping An Insurance Group (hereinafter referred to as "China Ping An", SH60 13 18. SH) Initiated the establishment of One Connect Financial Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Financial One Account", NYSE:OCFT) through the integration of business and personnel.
Financial One Account Connect is another unicorn enterprise hatched by Ping An in China after lufax Holdings, Ping An Good Doctor and Ping An Medical Insurance Technology, and it is also the first subsidiary listed in the United States.
In the past five years, after renaming, attracting investment and listing, the financial account has grown from the initial "three noes" (no basic customers, no standard products and no business model) to a financial technology "unicorn" with a market value of nearly 8 billion US dollars. According to the previous plan, financial accounts are entering a stage of rapid growth.
There is annual report data to prove it: On February 3rd, the financial report of the first full fiscal year since the listing of Financial One Account Connect showed that its gross profit margin was increasing year by year, from 32.9% in 20 19 to 37.5% in 2020, with a year-on-year increase of 13.98%. Gross profit was 65.438+0.243 billion yuan (RMB, the same below), with a year-on-year growth rate of 62.65438+0%, far exceeding the revenue growth rate.
In 2020, under the shadow of the COVID-19 epidemic, it is difficult to see any positive growth of the index.
In the course of five years' development, I'm afraid no year has impressed financial executives more than 2020. "It may be a conservative statement to say that 2020 is an unusual year." Ye Wangchun, Chairman and CEO of Financial Yitong, said in the 2020 earnings conference call.
After five years' development, the financial account has established a clear product strategy, and the product line has completed the vertical full coverage from SaaS to IaaS, realizing the transformation from spare parts to vehicle manufacturing.
International investment banks such as CLSA, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and KeyBanc raised the target price of integrated financial accounts in recent reports, and maintained the rating of "outperforming the market" or "buying".
According to Morgan Stanley's research report, from customer acquisition, risk management to internal cost control, financial technology will become one of the key areas of competitive differentiation of financial institutions in the future.
202 1 is the opening year of the next five years. With the penetration of digitalization in the financial industry, the development of unified financial accounts is full of imagination.
2020: Resilience growth
Recently, a new management concept-"flexible growth" has become popular in business circles, which means that enterprises need to pay more attention to the quality of development rather than simply pursuing speed. They should pay more attention to sustainable development and create a more flexible development model.
In the turbulent year of 2020, the concept of "resilient growth" is also being implemented by financial accounts. One performance is to pay more attention to the improvement of profitability. "Despite the difficulties, we achieved a revenue growth of 42.3% and a net profit margin of more than 30 percentage points. This is an amazing feat. " Ye Wangchun said in the earnings conference call.
On the one hand, the improvement of profitability comes from the effective management and control of operating costs, which improves the standardization of the original business and shortens the implementation time, thus reducing the labor cost. The financial report shows that in 2020, its proportion in the total operating cost will drop from 102.8% at the end of 20 19 to 83.7%. Among them, the marketing expense is 629 million yuan, slightly lower than 636 million yuan in 20 19. At the same time, the total expenditure on R&D investment increased by 16.8% to1370 million yuan.
On the other hand, it benefits from the upgrading of products by financial one account. It is understood that low-value businesses, that is, pure channel-type services, have been actively eliminated, and the proportion of high-value businesses has further increased.
The increase in the proportion of high-value business is not only reflected in the gross profit margin, but also in the growth of ARPU (per capita income) of head customers. By 2020, the number of high-quality customers of financial one-account service will increase from 473 to 594.
Thanks to its product upgrade and cost control, by 2020, the gross profit of financial one-account service has increased to 65.438+24.3 billion yuan, up 626.5438+0% year-on-year; The gross profit margin has also increased from 32.9% at the end of 20 19 to 37.5%, which has increased by 10 percentage point in recent two years.
By strengthening the meticulous management of expenses, the net loss of financial accounts narrowed from1661000000 yuan to13540000 yuan, and the net loss rate decreased by 29.8 percentage points year-on-year to 42.7%, with a loss of 273 million yuan.
Roger Covey, CFO of Financial One Account, said in the earnings conference call that the changes of these indicators show that the product upgrade of Financial One Account has achieved remarkable results, "reflecting the company's strong operational capability and good cost control."
The Bank of America Merrill Lynch report predicts that in fiscal year 20021,the financial one-account income will increase by at least 42% year-on-year, and the net profit rate will achieve double-digit growth. "The optimized product structure of financial one account will promote its long-term profit growth".
Morgan Stanley pointed out in the research report that it is expected that the income of financial one-account will maintain a compound annual growth rate of 40% from 2002/KLOC-0 to 2023, which is much higher than that of Chinese and American financial technology counterparts. It is optimistic about the sustained growth of the profit rate of financial one-account and realize sustainable high income growth.
Space in the cloud
According to the 2020 financial report, in the fourth quarter, the revenue of cloud services platform from cloud services reached 365.438+04 billion yuan, of which the revenue in the fourth quarter alone was 65.438+09 billion yuan, and the intelligent risk control contributed 65.438+06.5438+03 billion yuan in the fourth quarter. These two items are considered by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and CLSA as boosters for the income growth of integrated financial accounts.
In recent years, emerging businesses such as cloud services have emerged, and financial cloud has become a key word in the field of financial technology. As a commercial technology cloud service platform for financial institutions, cloud service business is also an important force point, and 20 19 was launched in the second quarter. In 2020, the proportion of cloud service revenue to revenue was 9.48%, while in the fourth quarter it was as high as 17.75%.
The complete financial cloud market includes public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud infrastructure, as well as cloud platforms and cloud application solutions (software+services) for the financial industry.
Financial One Account Service provides full-stack cloud services such as IaaS (Infrastructure Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) for the whole industry, covering more than 95% of its business companies and supporting 80% of its business systems to be put into production.
KeyBanc, a well-known investment bank on Wall Street, pointed out that financial accounts are TaaS providers, mainly providing software+services in the financial industry. In line with the wave of digital transformation of the times, its cloud services are expected to continue to grow rapidly.
KeyBanc believes that with the continuous development of 202 1 to third-party customers, the revenue of cloud services from non-safe customers will increase, which will become the driving force of this market segment, thus continuously promoting the performance growth of financial one-account service.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch predicts that the adoption of cloud services and overseas expansion opportunities will become the medium and long-term driving force and growth force of financial unified accounts.
Strategic upgrade of "automobile output"
In 2020, the financial unified account strategy has undergone important changes. The "5+ 1" vehicle strategy of "horizontal integration and vertical full coverage" has changed from the previous "spare parts" model to "vehicle manufacturing".
The so-called "5+ 1" refers to "retail finance, enterprise finance, auto insurance, personal insurance, investment +Qamma", so as to realize the "whole process, end-to-end" technology empowerment in the vertical field of the financial industry.
Behind the strategic upgrade of "vehicle output", the product line of Financial One Account 16 covers the whole process services from marketing to customer acquisition, risk management and customer service, as well as the underlying technical services from data management and smart management to cloud platform.
The logic of upgrading the financial unified account strategy is that "new infrastructure" was written into the government work report for the first time in 2020, and financial infrastructure is regarded as one of the important soft powers of finance.
At the beginning of 2020, under the guidance of the local financial supervision bureau of Guangdong Province, EFT participated in the construction of the financing platform for SMEs in Guangdong Province, signed a series of strategic cooperation agreements with the Science and Technology Supervision Bureau of China Securities Regulatory Commission, China Insurance Asset Management Association and Hainan Provincial Finance Bureau, and actively participated in the "new financial infrastructure".
After the implementation of the "vehicle export" strategy, the unified financial account is no longer just to provide products, but to help customers of financial institutions achieve an appropriate balance between customized and integrated services, and evolve from "spare parts" services to TaaS enablers.
TaaS is the basic service in digital economy and value network. Compared with the pure blockchain technical services provided by BaaS, TaaS encapsulates the legal compliance details of blockchain technology and asset digitization, and provides enterprises with a unified and concise application interface for physical assets digitization.
A successful application case is the "Guangdong model" to solve the financing difficulties of small and medium-sized enterprises: on June 2, 2020, the financing platform for small and medium-sized enterprises in Guangdong Province was launched. This is supported by a financial account. Through advanced blockchain, cloud computing and other important underlying technologies, the information of more than 1 100000 enterprises in Guangdong Province is comprehensively collected for enterprise risk assessment and portrait, thus solving the financing problem of small and medium-sized enterprises.
After its operation in 2020, the platform has accessed 250 government affairs data of 34 government units, and more than 370 financial institutions have released more than 1 1,000 financial products on the platform, serving 720,000 enterprises, with a cumulative financing amount of 37.7 billion yuan.
In addition, Financial One Account Tong also established the Financial Open Portal (Guangxi) Cross-border Financial Digital Co., Ltd. together with Digital Guangxi Group, and took the lead in landing the "Shekou-Shunde Joint Port" project with China Merchants Group.
As a representative of new technologies and an important breakthrough in independent innovation of core technologies, blockchain has been formally incorporated into the new infrastructure information infrastructure, and has been promoted to a national strategy in June 20 19, and has been included in several key construction projects since 2020. Blockchain is also the "1" part of the financial unified account strategy.
As early as 2065438+August 2008, financial accounts participated in the blockchain verification pilot at Tianjin Port, and explored and tried the practical application of blockchain technology in cross-border trade scenarios. Eight months later (2065438+April 2009), Tianjin Port's cross-border trade blockchain network was officially put into operation. 20211/On October 27th, Yili Group held a winding signing ceremony with EFT, officially becoming a member of Tianjin Port's cross-border trade blockchain network.
Ye said that in order to seize the opportunity brought about by the digital transformation of finance, the financial one-account system continued to lay a solid technical foundation and meet the higher demand of digital development of financial institutions through continuous innovation and diversified products.
Nowadays, financial accounts have established smart banking cloud, smart insurance cloud, smart investment cloud and open platform, providing end-to-end solutions such as intelligent marketing, intelligent products, intelligent risk control and intelligent operation for financial institutions in the whole industry such as banking, insurance and investment.
Constructing ecological value
Internet companies and financial institutions with competition and cooperation have a little understanding: building a financial technology ecosystem is the key path for financial institutions to enhance their market competitiveness.
Whether it is a vertical or horizontal ecosystem, the richness of resources in the ecosystem and the ability to understand financial scenarios and financial customers' needs are indicators to measure the value of the financial ecosystem, which is the advantage of China Ping 'an and financial integration and the basic disk of the Ping 'an ecosystem.
As a comprehensive financial group, China Ping An attaches great importance to the layout of science and technology. Under the strategy of "finance+technology, finance+ecology", the business map has been continuously expanded, and the past accumulation has also made the "original wealth" of the unified financial account to a certain extent.
After five years of development, the unified financial account has begun to exert its strength in markets other than China Ping 'an. In 2020, there will be a number of major cooperation projects in various fields. For example, in the insurance field, we reached a European smart flash compensation cooperation with Swiss Re, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Shanghai 19 auto parts suppliers, and officially launched the cooperation plan of "building a good partner". In the future, we will carry out diversified cooperation in the automotive aftermarket parts supply chain, integrity maintenance network, warehousing and logistics, and form a strategic alliance to deepen the automotive aftermarket.
Open up the research, production and use chain of financial technology and combine "finance+technology" on the supply side to provide inexhaustible "energy" for business development. On the demand side, the deep integration of "finance+industry" services, strengthening the "aorta" of financial business and promoting the "integration" of financial technology are important propositions for the five-year development of financial accounts and the space for their future development.
In this sense, in today's financial system, the stock price is undervalued. It's not too late to get on the bus.
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