With the acceleration and deepening of this round of high-quality transformation of the industry, "differentiation" is becoming a key word in the transformation strategy of more and more insurance companies. Especially for the majority of small and medium-sized insurance companies, in the face of large companies have already seized the main market, as well as their own thin resource base, differentiated operation is considered to be the key to breaking through the fierce industry competition.
As the first and only life insurance company headquartered in Guangxi, Guofu Life has attracted widespread attention in the market since its establishment in 2018. Since its birth, Guofu Life Insurance has clearly cultivated the regional market and fully served customers in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, which is an important reason why it has attracted the attention of the industry.
Indeed, if we look at the current economic figures and the industry's inertial thinking of generally seizing the market in the eastern provinces, few insurance companies regard Guangxi as their main base. However, in Guofu's view, basing itself on Guangxi, a region where the mainland's regional ethnic autonomy system is clearly embodied, is also of great significance. Coupled with the development space and economic growth rate of Guangxi's insurance market, this has also become the basis for the company to find its own unique development path and open up a new perspective for the development of the mainland insurance industry while serving and protecting the local economy. It is also the original intention of the major shareholder, Guangxi Investment Group, and the relevant sponsors to comply with the development of China's economy and industry and invest in the establishment of Guofu Life.
Now, as it celebrates its sixth anniversary, how is the company doing, and where is this differentiated pace of regional deepening? In January 2023, Guofu Life's total assets exceeded 10 billion yuan, and in April 2022, it successfully opened a branch in Guizhou, taking the first step to deepen the region and radiate to neighboring provinces and then to the whole country. As of the end of May 2024, the total number of customers served by the company has reached 2.76 million, not only gaining a firm foothold in the local market, but also making its "Guangxi characteristics" more distinctive.
Guofu Life's in-depth exploration based on local and regional people over the past six years has made the high-quality development of the industry see richer and more diversified possibilities.
1 Speed and quality go hand in hand: a characteristic brand that grows together with Guangxi is rising
As one of the youngest life insurance companies in mainland China, Guofu Life Insurance has missed the period of rapid expansion of the life insurance industry when it was established, and the market structure has been formed.
However, the company, which is registered in a non-traditional economically developed province, is keenly aware of the market potential of Guangxi, and although it does not rank high in the national premium ranking, its growth rate has long been at the forefront. This has also allowed Guofu Life to maintain an astonishing growth rate since its birth, and even bucked the trend through several difficult years in the life insurance industry. In 2023, the scale premium of Guofu Life, which has been established for less than 6 years, has exceeded 3 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 80%. Since 2024, Guofu Life's large-scale premiums have exceeded those of the whole year of 2023 and maintained rapid growth.
More importantly, in the face of the intensive new policies inside and outside the industry in recent years, Guofu Life has also accelerated the pace of quality upgrading in its business, and various value-related indicators have achieved significant growth at a time when the industry is generally in difficulty.
As of May 2024, Guofu Life's new long-term insurance policy premium is 674 million yuan, which has accounted for half of the new policy. The accumulation of renewal premiums also exceeded half of the total premiums, reaching $1.56 billion.
The value contribution of the futures business has also promoted the increase of the company's real capital, allowing Guofu Life to achieve an endogenous improvement in solvency for the first time through the transformation of its own business structure and the improvement of its high-quality business capabilities. At present, the company's core solvency adequacy ratio has increased by 7.5 percentage points compared with the end of last year, and the comprehensive solvency adequacy ratio has increased by 12.4 percentage points compared with the end of last year, initially demonstrating a strong self-supply capacity.
Behind the growth of this market and value capability comes from Guofu Life's continuous cultivation and channel exploration of the Guangxi market, constantly finding contact points with local customers, and more acceptable models and methods.
In fact, with the support of Guangxi Investment Group and other shareholders, Guofu Life Insurance has carried out characteristic channel operation based on the local economic situation in Guangxi. In the bancassurance channel, the cooperation with local regional banking channels such as Guangxi Beibu Gulf Bank has continued to make breakthroughs; In the individual insurance channel, it also fully combines the characteristics of many state-owned enterprises in Guangxi, and carries out a variety of individual insurance business projects such as occupational business models for corporate enterprise customers; Coupled with the in-depth exploration of its own unique health insurance, Internet intermediaries and other channels, Guofu Life Insurance has continued to integrate into the regional economic ecology, injecting insurance vitality into the Guangxi market, and growing together with Guangxi with the continuous improvement of local people's insurance awareness and insurance needs.
In the first five months of 2024, Guofu Life's 13-month premium continuation rate has steadily increased, reaching 95% overall. In Guangxi, the premium ranking has ranked second in the market, four places higher than the end of 2023, and the new bancassurance policy has ranked first in the market.
This kind of business quality is naturally the acceptance, recognition and trust of Guofu Life in the Guangxi market and local customers, which has made the company gradually become an insurance brand with great regional influence, and has steadily become a leader among the life insurance companies operating in the same period in terms of total premiums, renewal premiums, and regular premiums.
2. Based on the characteristics of local people's needs: forging characteristic competitiveness with regional customized products
Regional in-depth cultivation and serving the differentiated needs of local customers can be said to be the foundation of Guofu Life, so where is this difference? And how can it be discovered, seen, and really formed into targeted solutions?
It should be said that in the vast territory of the mainland, different natural conditions and different economic conditions will inevitably lead to different living habits and different characteristics of the people in different regions in terms of security needs. For a long time, the industry tradition has been to implement a unified product strategy in all regions of the country, which has also made this difference in demand ignored by the industry for a long time. And this kind of neglected demand gap is undoubtedly the most important focus of Guofu Life.
Based in Guangxi, Guofu Life Insurance has the only professional actuarial team for life insurance products in the region, and also has unique experience in customer data accumulation and pricing. This has provided a strong technical background for Guofu Life to continuously discover and explore the characteristics of local consumer protection needs, and then provide more targeted products and services, and Guofu Life has also quickly seen the different characteristics of local health needs.
Located in South China, Guangxi's low-dimensional climate is humid and hot, and residents' dietary patterns are also different from those of most provinces in mainland China, which makes the local high-incidence species, health characteristics and corresponding needs different from the data experience of most insurance companies, and provides soil for Guofu Life to develop targeted product strategies.
Focusing on the characteristics of the health needs of the local people in Guangxi, Guofu Life has fully combined the actual local situation and data in terms of disease selection, scope of liability, protection methods, risk control, health management, etc., and quickly developed an exclusive health insurance series product with regional characteristics, "Bagui Worry-free", which can be said to be an instant hit in the market.
On this basis, Guofu Life has successively launched the first exclusive health insurance for new citizens in Guangxi, "Aixin Bao" and "Anxin Bao", and has provided exclusive value-added services in response to the current demand of local new citizens for medical resources. It has also launched the country's first provincial unified insurance product "Huigui Bao", and continues to participate in customized Huimin Insurance projects in many local cities, helping to build a multi-level social security system in Guangxi, while giving full play to its own advantages to promote the further coverage of "inclusive finance" in Guangxi. Not only that, in response to the needs of collaborative enterprise customers, Guofu Life Insurance has also developed and created the "Fu'an Life" critical illness insurance, gradually focusing on the needs of "region, platform and enterprise", and formed a characteristic customized product system integrating critical illness, accident and medical treatment.
With the help of the experience in health insurance, Guofu Life Insurance has also continued to cultivate the region in the field of "pension finance", closely combined with the pension needs and high incidence of local middle-aged and elderly groups, deeply explored differentiated health + pension products and services, and listed various products such as Fugui Jinsheng Pension Insurance and Filial Piety Insurance Comprehensive Security Plan for the Middle-aged and Elderly.
A wealth of customized products with regional characteristics has increasingly become Guofu Life's own distinctive and unique competitiveness.
3. Embrace the local economy and people's livelihood in an all-round way, and use services to base ourselves on the present and move towards the future
From the moment it entered Guangxi and officially opened, Guofu Life has been closely integrated with the local development, not only fully embracing the local market, serving the local people, creating characteristic products and business methods, but also integrating the company itself into the local social and economic development, forming a feedback to the local economy.
As of the end of May 2024, Guofu Life's cumulative investment in Guizhou has reached 4.862 billion yuan, and in the past five months alone, the cumulative new investment has reached 328 million yuan, and the existing investment scale in Guizhou is 1.286 billion yuan.
During the 8th China-ASEAN Insurance Cooperation and Development Forum in 2023, the "Guofu Life-Nanning Rail Transit Infrastructure Insurance Investment Project" was officially signed as one of the achievements of the financial opening door to ASEAN. This makes Guofu Life an important bridge between Guangxi and ASEAN countries.
Not only that, Guofu Life also pays great attention to the livelihood and well-being of the people in Guangxi, and comprehensively promotes rural revitalization and common prosperity. In 2023, Guofu Life donated personal accident insurance with a total insurance amount of more than 4.9 billion yuan to about 7,100 first secretaries in villages in Guangxi for the sixth consecutive year, and continued to carry out special public welfare activities, and various inclusive insurance projects also attracted nearly 100,000 people in the region to participate in the insurance in 2023.
In terms of claims services, Guofu Life continues to improve the convenience and experience of services, continuously strengthens service innovation and introduces various related technologies to promote the popularization and acceptance of WeChat self-service and other services among customers, so that customers can feel the convenience and experience brought by "digital finance" and "technology finance".
With the help of OCR recognition, online signature of the application, face recognition, big data risk control and other technologies to realize the online claim application and the photo upload of claim data, Guofu Life has greatly reduced the time limit for claims settlement and greatly increased the customer's sense of access to insurance services. As of May 31, 2024, with the iterative upgrade of WeChat's self-service claim service, the online claim settlement rate has increased to 77.5%. Focusing on the continuous improvement of online claims settlement level and customer acceptance, Guofu Life Insurance has launched the 3.3.2 special claim settlement service, continuously empowering services with technology and establishing a good reputation in the regional market.
"Based in Guangxi, deeply cultivated in Guangxi, facing the whole country, and radiating ASEAN" may not only be a slogan, but also a long-term plan for the company's own characteristic concept. After solving the survival at the beginning of the opening with "basing ourselves in Guangxi", and consolidating its own foundation and cultivating unique competitiveness through "deep cultivation in Guangxi", it is also a natural prospect for the whole country.
And we also believe that this is what the industry expects from this company as well.