How Ping An, an insurer, became a fintech super-app

A JOB INTERVIEW at Ping An is a strange experience. To become an agent at the insurance group, the world’s largest by market capitalisation, candidates must take questions from an intelligent machine. As they respond, their voice, choice of words and gestures are scrutinised for the qualities of the most productive salespeople. After accruing data from millions of such interviews, the firm believes its artificial-intelligence (AI) system can quickly pluck talent and weed out the duds. Judged by the company’s agent-productivity scores, it is working.

Just as the recruitment tool offers a glimpse into the future of hiring, Ping An itself may offer a window on to the future of finance. The tool is just one of thousands of applications built by the group’s army of engineers. They support a sprawling array of services, from insurance and banking to health care and education, which this year alone have been used by close to 600m people. No other traditional financial-services group in the world comes close to rivalling Ping An’s ability to develop technologies and deploy them at such a scale.