Since 2025, the life insurance industry has accelerated its transition to "guaranteed plus floating" return products. Leading insurers, represented by Ping An, have significantly increased their focus on participating insurance products. By optimizing liability structures and reducing rigid costs, they aim to alleviate investment pressures on the asset side.
Recently, Fu Xin, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Ping An, revealed in an exclusive interview that "in 2025, participating insurance business accounted for approximately 30% of the company's individual agent channel sales." Regarding sales plans for this type of insurance, Fu Xin further stated that for 2026, participating insurance will be the core product promoted throughout the year, with its business share expected to climb further.
Fu Xin believes the current growth in life insurance demand is driven short-term by asset allocation adjustments amid declining interest rates. Medium to long-term, it reflects the ongoing recovery of residents' needs for both protection and savings. With its unique service advantage of "integrated finance plus healthcare and elderly care," Ping An is well-positioned to effectively meet customers' continuously upgrading protection and savings demands.
Discussing Ping An's long-standing "AI in All" technology strategy, Fu Xin stated, "Ping An possesses massive data, diverse application scenarios, and online-to-offline traffic channels. Leveraging these core strengths, the company can not only adapt to industry changes in the AI era but is also poised to become a leader and core value creator."
Regarding the implementation results of Ping An's 2025 participating insurance transition, Fu Xin provided a detailed explanation. She indicated that increasing focus on participating insurance is an inevitable choice for insurers to adapt to the current low-interest-rate market environment. For customers, these products allow policyholders to share in the insurer's excess investment returns, making them increasingly competitive during periods of falling rates. For insurers, developing participating insurance helps hedge against interest rate fluctuation risks, optimizes liability cost structures, and provides more flexible allocation space for equity assets, supporting long-term, stable investment returns.
Amid intensifying homogeneous competition for participating products, Ping An leverages its group's healthcare and elderly care ecosystem to create a distinctive "insurance plus services" model, which is key to enhancing product competitiveness. Fu Xin explained that the company has established two major product service systems: "insurance plus health" and "insurance plus elderly care," comprehensively covering customers' protection and wealth planning needs throughout their lifecycle.
The "insurance plus health" series includes medical, critical illness, and wealth/retirement products, offering tailored services for different customer segments to meet various health needs. The "insurance plus elderly care" series covers home-based care and wellness communities. The home-based care service features an industry-unique "three-in-one" system of butlers, proactive health management, smart safety monitoring, and emergency rescue. The wellness communities, adhering to an "urban core retirement" concept, are located in prime city areas, such as the operational Yinian Cheng·Jing'an No.8 in Shanghai, providing high-quality living environments and comprehensive services. This industry-leading service offering significantly boosts the competitiveness of participating products.
With current market interest rates remaining low and a large volume of resident time deposits maturing, putting pressure on wealth management returns, the bancassurance channel presents a development opportunity. Fu Xin pointed out that, short-term, the rising popularity of life insurance products is partly driven by a "deposit shift" phenomenon. As deposit and bank wealth management product yields continue to decline, life insurance products offering stable returns and long-term locked-in yields are becoming an alternative for idle funds, essentially representing a reallocation of resident assets in a low-rate environment.
"However, from a medium to long-term perspective, this market shift is not a temporary short-term trend," Fu Xin further analyzed. The structure of resident asset allocation is undergoing a deep-seated restructuring. On one hand, the traditional dominant model of "property plus deposits" is gradually adjusting. On the other hand, accelerated population aging is increasing expectations for spending on elderly care and healthcare, strengthening demand for long-term protection and stable savings-type financial products.
In 2025, Ping An's management formally introduced the "AI in All" technology strategy, fully advancing the implementation of the "Five Intelligences" strategy—intelligent marketing, service, operations, management, and business operations—using digital and intelligent means to empower the entire business chain.
Under this strategy, Fu Xin noted that Ping An continues to increase investment in four core elements: algorithms, data, scenarios, and computing power, building a strong AI moat. The focus of Ping An's tech strategy is on AI applications. With leading technological capabilities, the company aims to become the most professional financial advisor, health consultant, and elderly care manager for its customers.
"AI is not an option; it's a necessity," stated Co-CEO Guo Xiaotao during an earnings presentation, emphasizing that artificial intelligence is a global tech trend and "technology leadership" is a key strategic direction for the group. Guo also outlined a technology platform upgrade plan. Under the "Integrated Finance: Nine into One" initiative, the plan consolidates over 700 million scattered internet registered users and more than ten disparate business portals into a unified integrated finance platform, achieving full integration of traffic, service entry points, customer experience, and backend data. The platform now boasts over 90 million monthly active users, ranking firmly in the top tier of the financial industry.
Fu Xin added that in 2026, Ping An will leverage this upgraded plan to launch efficient, one-stop services, creating a unified traffic pool. Through technological capabilities, it will implement intelligent operations for traffic integration, distribution, and exchange, enabling online service, migration, and customer acquisition, and completing online-to-offline customer management. In healthcare, Ping An's AI medical division has built a three-product matrix comprising AI consultation, AI medical assistant, and AI MDT intelligent consultation. On the supply side, Ping An relies on Peking University Medical Group and collaborates with over 3,000 hospitals and 100,000 health management institutions.
Based on the Wall Street HALO investment logic—which focuses on heavy-asset investments and low-elimination strategies targeting physical hard assets with high entry costs, high barriers, difficulty in replication, and resistance to disruption by new technologies, to secure long-term, stable, counter-cyclical returns—Fu Xin stated that Ping An, with its offline heavy-asset layout and full licenses in "finance plus healthcare," has built a robust industry barrier aligned with HALO logic. This constitutes a competitive advantage that pure internet platforms or light-asset AI firms find difficult to overcome.
In 2025, Ping An's operating profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company reached 134.415 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.3%. The company proposed a final dividend for 2025 of 1.75 yuan per share in cash; the total annual dividend was 2.70 yuan per share, up 5.9% year-on-year; total cash dividends amounted to 48.891 billion yuan, marking the 14th consecutive year of increase. The cash dividend payout ratio based on operating profit attributable to shareholders was 36.4%.
"The company always places high importance on shareholder returns, sharing growth dividends with long-term shareholders," Fu Xin said. Ping An maintains a policy of linking dividends medium-to-long-term with operating profit growth. Its dividend level is highly competitive within the industry, with a leading payout ratio; total dividends over the past decade have approached 376 billion yuan.
In Fu Xin's view, given the current environment of declining market interest rates and scarcity of high-quality core assets, moderately increasing the dividend payout ratio to return operational results to shareholders is a more prudent and efficient business decision. The steady rise in the company's dividend ratio in recent years also reflects a transition in its development stage: the core insurance business has shifted from early "scale expansion" to "high-quality development," with capital consumption gradually stabilizing. Implementing a consistent and stable dividend policy now can bolster market confidence in the company's profit quality and cash flow stability, while also better attracting long-term value investors.
Fu Xin also emphasized strong confidence in the prospects of Ping An's core business, future earnings growth, the long-term stable trajectory of operating profit, and the sustainability of the dividend policy. From an investment value perspective, Ping An stock offers both considerable dividend income and long-term growth potential, representing a valuable long-term holding and an excellent allocation choice for long-term value investors.
Regarding industry prospects, Fu Xin stated directly that the life insurance sector is entering a golden development period, with insurance stock valuations at historical lows. "From an industry perspective, resident demand for high-quality medical and elderly care services, along with diversified asset allocation, continues to rise. Simultaneously, insurers represented by Ping An are continuously optimizing product structures and deepening the 'insurance plus services' layout, leading to steady growth in new business value. The industry is set to enter a golden development era."
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