INTERVIEW
Blue revolutionises HK’s stagnant insurance industry One way to break free of the misconceptions about insurance is through gamification.
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ong Kong may be one of Asia’s prized financial centres, yet digital penetration of services in some financial sectors remains low. The insurance sector is one of them. Despite being seen as a mature market, digital penetration in the sector is less than 2%. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Hong Kong’s insurance industry also suffers from complex products, complex language, a really complex experience, and in many cases, even poor customer satisfaction. “Very often in terms of products, you see so many new product innovations, but the consumer doesn’t really have access to all the choices,” Charles Hung, CEO of Blue, Hong Kong’s first digital life insurer, told Insurance Asia in an exclusive interview. “In general, the digital adoption in Hong Kong is low, not just for the insurance industry, but even for other online services such as online shopping, digital wallet usage. It is relatively low compared to the other locations, and perhaps compared to other industries, as well,” Hung added. Hung recognised these pain points; you could even say he is an expert at it. Before becoming chief executive of the digital insurer, Hung spent 30 years working a variety of senior roles in different financial industries, occupying CIO, CSO, and chief executive roles in the banking, insurance, and asset management industries. He has also worked in a plethora of markets, not just in Hong Kong, but also in the US, Japan, and China. His background has given him extensive knowledge about the problems the insurance sector faces—and prepared him for the ambitious task of leading an enterprise set on revolutionising the insurance industry. Because Blue is going big or going none: they plan to leave their mark by upturning misconceptions about insurance, providing simple, flexible, tech-savvy products and services to their customers. Insurance Asia caught up with Hung to learn more about Hong Kong’s first digital insurer, as well as their plans to revolutionise Hong Kong’s insurance industry. As Hong Kong’s first digital insurer, how has Blue made use of technology i to create a seamless customer journey? Technology is really is the driving force of our entire business model. We leverage a lot of technology, the ABCD. First in “A,” artificial intelligence (AI). We use a lot of AIs in the journey that we provide to our customers. For example, If you apply facial recognition technology to help in the identification journey, this would really enhance the customer experience. We are also the first insurer in Hong Kong to adopt Tencent’s cloud technology. This is a very important part of our core infrastructure in terms of dealing with increasing
14 INSURANCE ASIA
Charles Hung, CEO of Blue
capacities, performance, and speed. We have a very good cloud infrastructure to help us to support our customers. Specifically, this is helping us in Blue to deal with scalability issues and other challenges, because we do have a very good infrastructure in place. Then for the C and D, that’s cloud and data analytics. We use a lot of data to analyze the market needs and the customer needs. In terms of just market customer data, we use a lot to improve both our underwriting process and the user experience, as well.
Blue’s vision is to innovate insurance together. We’re here to disrupt the market
Blue is a joint venture between Hillhouse and Tencent. What inspired these two entities to team up and launch a digital-only insurer in Hong Kong? I’ll say that there are really two parts to that: first, it’s about the market pain points and also about the low penetration rate. The insurance industry has been lagging behind in the financial industry in terms of digital penetration. Overall, the market has less than a 2% penetration from a digital perspective—way, way behind other sectors in the financial industry. Our shareholders have the capability to house fantastic and very strong investment capabilities. Tencent is of course very strong in terms of technologies and also in the area of the internet. The combination of these two factors gives us the