How Chinese insurer Ping An uses facial recognition to stop its agents skipping meetings

Like many financial companies, Ping An Insurance (Group), mainland China’s second largest insurer by premiums, is using face and voice recognition systems to combat fraud.

But as well as protecting customers from the activities of con artists, the firm is also using the technology to prevent some slightly shady behaviour within its own ranks.

“Before we introduced facial recognition, some agents who didn’t attend the morning briefing would ask their friends to sign them in using their staff card. Now the agents have to show their face to sign in, so we can make sure all of our 1.4 million agents go to work and attend the briefing,” said Jessica Tan Sin-yin, deputy group chief executive.

Ping An’s face and voice recognition systems have accuracy rates of 99.8 per cent and 99.7 per cent respectively, she said.

The insurer has been making a big push in technology and plans to invest 100 billion yuan (US$15.86 billion) over the next 10 years in financial and medical technology, Tan said. It has already invested 50 billion yuan in the last decade.

“Face and voice recognition can help prevent fraud. In the US and other markets, there are many cases of identity theft where people steal someone else’s identity to borrow loans and then disappear. These thefts lead to bad debts,” Tan said.