Ping An Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Fu Xin: Ping An is expected to become a leader and core value creator in the AI era

Per Daily News reporter | Tu Yinghao
Per Daily News editor | Huang Sheng

Since 2025, the personal insurance industry has been accelerating its shift toward “guaranteed floor + floating” return-focused products. Leading insurers such as Ping An have stepped up their dividend insurance layout, easing investment pressure on the asset side by optimizing liability structures and cutting back rigid costs.

Recently, Fu Xin, deputy general manager and chief financial officer of China Ping An, revealed in an exclusive interview with a reporter from the 《Daily Economic News》 that, “In 2025, dividend insurance under the individual insurance (individual channel) business accounted for about 30% of the company’s share.” Regarding this year’s dividend insurance sales plan, Fu Xin further said that in 2026, the company will make dividend insurance the company’s core promoted insurance product throughout the year, and the relevant business share is expected to rise further.

Fu Xin believes that the growth in the demand for life insurance in this cycle is, in the short term, driven by falling interest rates leading to asset allocation adjustments, while in the long term it reflects the continued recovery of residents’ demand for protection and savings. Meanwhile, Ping An, with its unique service advantage of “comprehensive finance + medical and pension,” can effectively meet the evolving, upgraded protection and savings needs of customers.

When discussing the advantages of China Ping An’s long-term commitment to the “AI in All” technology strategy (fully implementing artificial intelligence), Fu Xin said, “Ping An sits on a vast amount of data, a rich and diverse set of application scenarios, and online-and-offline integrated traffic entry points. Leveraging these core strengths, the company can not only deal calmly with industry changes in the AI (artificial intelligence) era, but also has the potential to become a leader in the AI era and a core creator of value.”

Image source: Provided by the interviewee

For all of 2026, dividend insurance will be the main focus, and competitiveness will be enhanced with “insurance + services”

In response to the rollout results of Ping An’s dividend insurance transformation in 2025, Fu Xin provided a detailed interpretation during the interview. She said that increasing dividend insurance business is an inevitable choice for insurers to adapt to the current low-interest-rate market environment. From the customer perspective, dividend insurance allows policyholders to share the insurer’s excess investment returns; in a period of falling interest rates, the competitive advantages of such products become even more prominent. From the insurer’s operating perspective, focusing on dividend insurance can effectively hedge the risks arising from interest-rate fluctuations, optimize liability cost structure, and at the same time, dividend insurance funds offer more flexible space for allocation to equity assets, helping the company achieve long-term, steady investment returns.

Against the backdrop of intensifying product homogenization in the dividend insurance industry, Ping An relies on the group’s medical and pension ecosystem to build a distinctive “insurance + services” model, making it a key lever for enhancing product competitiveness. Fu Xin introduced that the company has already established two major product and service systems: “insurance + medical and health” and “insurance + pension,” covering customers’ protection and wealth management needs across their entire lifecycle.

Among them, the “insurance + medical and health” series achieves system-based coverage of medical insurance, critical illness insurance, and wealth pension-type products. It provides tailored services for different customer groups to meet customers’ medical and health needs under different health conditions. The “insurance + pension” series covers home-based senior care and life-care communities. In home-based senior care, Ping An builds a “three-in-one” model of services—caretaker services, proactive health management, safe smart monitoring, and rescue services—making it the industry’s only one. The life-care community adheres to the “city-heart senior care” philosophy, building high-end life-care communities in the core areas of cities and providing high-quality living environments and premium services across all scenarios. Currently, I Nian Cheng · Jing’an No. 8 in Shanghai has officially commenced operations. With industry-leading service supply, it will greatly enhance the competitiveness of dividend products.

With market interest rates continuing to trend downward, many residents’ term deposits are coming due, putting pressure on investment returns. The bank-insurance channel has entered a window of opportunity for development. Fu Xin pointed out that in the short term, life insurance products are seeing rising market heat, behind which there is a certain degree of “deposit shifting.” As deposit and bank wealth management return rates continue to fall, life insurance products that offer stable returns and can lock in long-term payouts form a substitution effect for residents’ idle funds. In essence, this is a process of reallocating residents’ assets in a low-interest-rate environment.

“But from a medium- to long-term perspective, this market change is not a purely phase-based short-term trend.” Fu Xin further analyzed that residents’ asset allocation structure is currently undergoing a deeper-level reconstruction. On one hand, the traditional mainstream allocation model of “property + deposits” is gradually adjusting. On the other hand, with the acceleration of population aging, residents’ expectations for spending on senior care and healthcare are increasing, and demand for long-term protection and steady savings-oriented financial products continues to strengthen.

Building a strong AI moat, with strategic emphasis on AI applications

In 2025, China Ping An’s management formally proposed the “AI in All” technology strategy, fully promoting the implementation of the “five-智” (five-intelligence) strategy: intelligent marketing, intelligent service, intelligent operations, intelligent management, and intelligent business, empowering the entire business chain through digital and intelligent approaches.

Fu Xin said that under the guidance of this strategy, China Ping An has continued to increase investment in four core elements—algorithms, data, scenarios, and computing power—building a strong AI moat. Ping An’s key focus for its technology strategy is AI applications. With leading technology capabilities, it aims to become customers’ most professional financial advisor, health advisor, and retirement care butler.

“AI is not a multiple-choice question; it is a required-answer question.” At the earnings release conference, Guo Xiaotao, co-CEO of China Ping An, spoke about the company’s AI strategy. He said that artificial intelligence is a global trend in technological development, and “technology-driven leadership” is one of the important strategic directions proposed by the Group for 2026. Guo Xiaotao also introduced a technology platform upgrade plan for Ping An. Under the “comprehensive finance · nine-to-one” plan, the Group integrates more than 700 million dispersed internet-registered users within the Group and more than ten dispersed business entry points into a unified comprehensive finance platform, fully connecting and aggregating traffic, service entry points, customer experience, and back-end data. Currently, the platform’s monthly active users have exceeded 90 million, and its scale has consistently ranked it among the top first-tier in the financial industry.

Fu Xin further said in the interview that in 2026, China Ping An will rely on this upgrade plan to launch an efficient and fast one-stop service, creating a unified traffic pool. Through technology capabilities, the company will enable the integration and distribution of traffic and intelligent swapping operations, implement online services, migration, and customer acquisition, and complete customer management with online-offline integration. In healthcare, Ping An’s AI medical solution builds a three-product matrix—from AI symptom inquiry and AI medical assistance to AI MDT intelligent consultations. On the supply side, Ping An relies on the Peking University Health Science Group and, at the same time, has collaborated with more than 3,000 hospitals and 100,000+ health management institutions.

Grounded in the HALO investment logic on Wall Street—namely, relying on heavy-asset deployment, a low rate of replacement, focusing investment on real hard assets with high input costs, high industry barriers, difficult to replicate, and not easily overturned by new technologies—to obtain long-term steady and anti-cyclical investment returns. Fu Xin said that China Ping An, leveraging its offline heavy-asset layout and the advantages of full-licensing capabilities across “finance + medical,” has built a hard-core industry moat that fits the HALO logic. This is a competitive advantage that pure internet platforms and light-asset AI companies find hard to surpass.

Sticking to long-term shareholder returns, with total dividends in the past decade of nearly RMB 376 billion

In 2025, China Ping An’s operating profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company was RMB 134.415 billion, up 10.3% year over year. The company plans to distribute a cash dividend of RMB 1.75 per share for the 2025 final dividend; for the full year, cash dividends of RMB 2.70 per share, up 5.9% year over year; and total cash dividends of RMB 48.891 billion, increasing for 14 consecutive years. The cash dividend payout ratio calculated based on operating profit attributable to the parent company was 36.4%.

“The company has always attached great importance to shareholder returns, and shares the fruits of growth with long-term shareholders.” Fu Xin said that China Ping An adheres to a long-term linkage between dividend payouts and the growth rate of operating profit. Dividend levels are highly competitive within the industry, with the dividend payout ratio leading among peers. Over the past decade, the total dividend amount has been nearly RMB 376 billion.

In Fu Xin’s view, under the current macro environment of downward movement in the market interest rate center and a scarcity of high-quality core assets, appropriately increasing the dividend proportion and returning operating results to shareholders is a more prudent and efficient business decision. In recent years, the company’s dividend payout ratio has been steadily increasing, which also reflects the transformation in the company’s development stage: the insurance main business has shifted from the earlier “scale expansion” to “high-quality development,” and capital consumption has gradually become more stable. At this time, implementing a continuously stable dividend policy can not only strengthen market confidence in the company’s earnings quality and cash flow stability, but also better attract allocations of long-term value capital.

Fu Xin also emphasized in the interview that Ping An has sufficient confidence in the outlook for its core businesses, the long-term steady trend of operating profit growth, and the sustainability of its dividend policy. From the perspective of investment value, Ping An’s stock combines attractive dividend returns with long-term growth potential, and has value for long-term holding. For long-term value investors, it is a high-quality allocation choice.

Regarding industry development prospects, Fu Xin said directly that the life insurance industry is entering a golden period of development, and the valuation of the insurance sector is at historically low levels. “From the industry level, residents’ demand for high-quality medical and senior care services and for diversified asset allocation continues to rise. At the same time, insurers represented by Ping An continue to optimize product structures and deepen their ‘insurance + services’ layout. New business value is growing steadily, and the industry will enter a golden period of development.”

Cover image source: Provided by the interviewee