The 2026 Sustainable Global Leaders Conference was held from October 20 to 22 at the Huangpu Expo Park in Shanghai.
China Life Insurance Company Limited (ASX: 601628) Chief Compliance Officer Xu Chongmiao attended the event and delivered a speech.
Xu stated that sustainable development is transitioning from information disclosure into a new phase focused on value creation and resilience building. While technological innovation unleashes efficiency dividends, it also brings a series of challenges including data security, business ethics, and energy consumption management. The key to addressing these issues—seeking inclusive development amid transformation and creating certainty within uncertainty—lies in companies returning to the core value of ESG, anchoring ethical bottom lines during development, balancing long-term value, and ensuring that efficiency gains truly become a driving force for sustainable development.
Drawing on the practices of China Life (HKEX: 02628), Xu elaborated on how the life insurance industry should remain true to its origins while advancing with the times, injecting greater certainty into building a sustainable future.
Staying True to the Core: Building a More Solid Social Safety Net
Upholding the essence of insurance is the unwavering original aspiration of China Life. Adhering to a people-centered development philosophy, the company fully leverages its insurance protection function and serves as a vital link between national strategy and market practice in supporting high-quality economic and social development. Focusing on core areas such as health and elderly care and inclusive protection, the company continues to improve its multi-tiered, broadly accessible insurance protection services. As of the first half of the year, the company's liability reserves reached 6.9 trillion yuan, having served over 600 million individual customers cumulatively. It has deeply participated in operating more than 200 critical illness insurance projects, over 90 long-term care insurance projects, and 140 city-customized commercial medical insurance (Huimin Bao) projects. Actively responding to population aging, the company developed over 40 new health and elderly care insurance products in the first half of the year, continuously enriching elderly care protection offerings to meet the diverse retirement needs of the public. Meanwhile, the company continues to expand and improve its insurance services: in the first half of the year, it newly underwrote coverage for 94.4 million elderly individuals, served over 290,000 small and micro enterprises, and provided risk protection exceeding 8 trillion yuan. It continues to deepen insurance assistance, providing 17 trillion yuan in risk protection for over 140 million rural residents, steadily amplifying the impact of inclusive insurance and rural revitalization insurance programs so that development outcomes benefit all people more broadly.
AI Plus Service: Making China Life's Service More Tangible
Technology empowers efficiency while original aspiration safeguards warmth—this is the practical answer of China Life in the AI era, using service upgrades to support a resilient future. On the efficiency side, the company insists on adding through technology and subtracting through carbon emissions, pursuing intelligent and integrated operations to comprehensively enhance digitalization across online claims, notifications, and payments. It has implemented direct outpatient claims settlement and fully automated claims processing, with some cases achieving claims settlement in seconds and an overall claims processing time of only 0.36 days. Customers no longer need to visit branches in person—the entire process can be completed online with a fingertip. Digital transformation not only significantly reduces customer waiting times but also cuts paper document consumption and travel carbon emissions at the source, achieving a win-win of service improvement and green operations. On the experience side, the company promotes the synergy of smart services and professional protection, facilitating innovation implementation and service enhancement. Relying on 24/7 intelligent customer service for precise responses, digital employees can enable one-click interaction and one-click matching of professional protection plans, using technology to benefit both customers and the company. On the supply side, the company leverages its professional advantages from a sustainable development perspective to customize comprehensive risk protection solutions for green industries and technology innovation enterprises. In the first half of the year, the company's insurance premium income from serving green industries and strategic emerging industries reached 600 million yuan and 1.7 billion yuan, respectively. Taking Shanghai as an example, in response to the long R&D cycles and prominent protection needs of technology innovation enterprises, the local branch established a dedicated service team to deeply engage with startups and create tailored protection solutions, safeguarding the growth of technology innovation companies. While embracing the intelligent wave, the company consistently upholds service inclusivity. China Life operates approximately 17,000 branches nationwide, from the Ali Plateau to the Mohan Port, from the Arctic Village to the border frontlines, continuously extending its service reach to bridge the "last mile" of insurance services, ensuring that customers across different regions, age groups, and levels of digital capability can equally access insurance protection, narrowing the digital divide, and preserving the warmth of service.
Responsible Investment: Making Sustainable Momentum Last Longer
Responsible investment is an important force driving sustainable economic and social development. China Life believes that responsible investment is not merely an external compliance requirement but a core capability at the foundation of investing. Leveraging the advantages of large-scale, long-duration life insurance funds, the company uses responsible investment as a key instrument to continuously empower high-quality economic and social development. In serving national strategies, the company treats serving the real economy as the core logic of asset allocation, continuously optimizing major asset class allocation and cross-cycle investment planning, steadily enhancing investment return resilience and long-term return capability, and relying on long-term mechanisms to balance risk management with value creation. As of the first half of the year, the company's existing investment in serving the real economy reached 6 trillion yuan, accounting for over 80% of total investment assets, encompassing both core foundational assets that solidify the return base and growth-oriented assets that capture industrial dividends. The company deeply embeds ESG principles throughout the entire investment chain, building systematic and professional sustainable investment capabilities, and continuously guiding financial resources toward strategic emerging fields such as artificial intelligence, computing power, new infrastructure, green technology, and smart livelihood technology. As of the first half of the year, the scale of technology finance investment exceeded 1 trillion yuan, with investment related to new quality productive forces exceeding 540 billion yuan. In the green transition track, the company continues to support low-carbon economic and social development. This year, it subscribed to 1 billion yuan in shares of the "China Life - Mengneng Green Equity Investment Plan," supporting the implementation of new energy projects with total installed capacity exceeding 34 million kilowatts. In frontier science and innovation fields, the company leverages vehicles such as sci-tech innovation funds and big health funds to increase investment in strategic emerging industries and future industries. Using the S-fund model, it opens channels for insurance capital to connect with the sci-tech innovation track, implementing benchmark projects covering thousands of technology enterprises and supporting domestic substitution. This year, the company has successively committed to the Yangtze River Delta Sci-Tech Innovation Fund, the Fujian Xinrui Relay Fund, and the Shenghe Xincheng Equity Investment Fund, with total committed scale of 11.8 billion yuan, injecting long-term capital momentum into technological self-reliance and self-strengthening.
Smart Risk Control: Making the Operational Resilience Foundation More Solid
Smart risk control is both a safety line for business operations and a solid shield for protecting customer rights. The company adheres to a dual-driven approach of development and security, integrating ESG principles into its risk management system, with key focus on sustainability-related risks such as climate risk and data security, building a full-process closed-loop mechanism for risk identification, monitoring, and resolution to construct more resilient value protection for customers. Leveraging artificial intelligence and big data technology, the company has innovatively built an intelligent sales risk early-warning system, advancing risk control thresholds through proactive intervention, precisely identifying high-risk behaviors, and promptly investigating and resolving risk hazards. It has also collaborated with regulatory authorities to establish a money laundering risk situational awareness platform, driving risk management from experience-based judgment toward precise quantification, effectively safeguarding customer fund transaction security and maintaining stable financial order. Efficient smart risk control relies on high-quality data system support. The company continuously strengthens its data governance capabilities and is the first institution in the insurance industry to obtain the highest-level certification for data management capability maturity. It has built a "visible, usable, and secure" trusted data space, both promoting the orderly release of data value and providing a protective layer for customer information privacy. A solid data foundation supports the precision and accuracy of risk management, delivering a safer and higher-quality service experience for customers.
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