ZhongAn partners with Singapore insurer to scale digital insurance innovation

Chinese online insurer ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance announced on Thursday that it has partnered up with NTUC Income, a leading insurance company in Singapore, to scale up its innovation in digital insurance and better meet customers’ demand.

Under the partnership, ZA Tech Global, a subsidiary of the Shanghai-based online insurance company dedicated to overseas technology exports, aimed to leverage Income’s position as a top composite underwriter in Singapore to test-bed and scale digital innovations in the country and a wider Asian area.

For Income, it plans to harness ZhongAn’s deep technological know-how, experience and knowledge in collaborating with ecosystem partners to deliver a pipeline of innovative digital insurance offerings, according to the announcement.

For example, the “Digital Insurance Core System,” a key technology asset owned by ZhongAn, will help the Singaporean firm improve its agility and cost-efficiency to introduce more bespoke protection plans to customers.

To start, the collaboration will introduce a lifestyle insurance product tailored to the tourism sector in Singapore by the second quarter of 2019. The policy aims to protect both residents and tourists against contingent events when they visit specific tourist attractions.

By leveraging ZhongAn’s cloud-based insurance technology solutions, the new policy will enable Income to process millions of insurance policies every day and create new offerings with greater efficiency and cost saving.

Wayne Xu, president of ZA International, said that he believed Income’s digital aspiration would support their business expansion in Southeast Asia.

Bill Song, chief executive officer of ZA Tech, noted the partnership with Income marked another step to extend their business globally and they were excited to be fostering cooperation on ZhongAn’s technology platform.