China Continent Insurance Company

Background:

With annual premium income of US$ 6.2 billion in 2018, China Continent Insurance Company (CCIC) ranked number five in China. CCIC’s insurance lines of business include both personal and commercial Property and Casual Insurance such as Auto, Cargo, Accident, Health, Shipment, Home/Enterprise Property, Engineering, Agriculture, Liability insurance, etc. and the related reinsurance.

CCIC has set an ambitious plan to pursue a “tech driven” growth strategy in the coming digital era. Replacing a Java based enterprise core system that has been powering its last 15 years of rapid growth with a cloud native, microservices based digital platform is a key condition to push this strategy. It is to enable CCIC to transform its business into truly customer centric, ecosystem oriented, and fully online.

Project Brief:

Decision to fully replace its Java core was made in July 2016 and after a systematic vendor selection, eBaoTech was awarded and implementation was formally kicked off in May 2017. The first launch of two pilot regional branches was made in December 2018, followed by another batch in May 2019, and the final rollout nationwide was successfully completed in July 2019. In its real and massive production operations, the new platform has been running smoothly and delivering its differentiating business values in all key dimensions. CCIC and eBaoTech jointly achieved a historical milestone: globally the first large scale and full line of business general insurer to run its entire businesses on a cloud native and microservices based core platform.

eBaoTech was awarded the project by CCIC mainly because the maturity and richness of eBaoCloud InsureMO or insurance middle office, which is positioned as global insurance industry middleware, and contains all basic elements of insurance capabilities in the form of microservices. All application functions and business platforms are developed by API calls to InsureMO. All CCIC’s internal staff user interfaces and workflows, as well as CCIC’s powerful Open API platform for massive ecosystem connectivity are developed by calling a comprehensive set of APIs from eBaoCloud InsureMO. This is an entirely new approach to develop core insurance systems and as a result, insurance innovations would be faster, cheaper, and more tailored made without reinventing the wheels of basic insurance APIs.

Figure 1. CCIC Open API Platform for fast channel connectivity, powered by InsureMO

Results and Outcomes:

Some key facts below:

  • Kicked off in May 2017, after 26 months, the new platform replaced 15 legacy systems
  • Around 70 million of policies were migrated
  • Supports 300+ insurance products, including all the general insurance business lines of auto, A&H, property, liability, marine, engineering, etc.
  • Peak time issues 400,000+ policies at RMB 400 million/USD 60 million in one day
  • 140,000 users including 70,000 from partners are using the platform actively
  • New product launch is shortened to 2 days
  • New channel integration is shortened to 1-3 days
  • 100+ new channels connected from API calls with InsureMO
  • Uploading a group policy of 100,000+ members takes 2 minutes
  • Elastic search of 70 million of policies takes less than 1 second

Globally, CCIC is the first large scale insurance company with all mainstream lines of insurance business, to run entirely on a core platform based on distributed, cloud-native and microservices middleware platform.

CCIC has won multiple industry awards in China and outside China, including the 2018 Asia Insurance Technology Awards (AITA) run by Celent and Asia Insurance Review. CCIC was recognized as the winner of “Legacy and Ecosystem Transformation” category with its adoption of the future-proof 4G (microservice and cloud-native architecture) insurance technology.

Figure 2. Asia Insurance Technology Award Trophy
About China Continent Insurance Co.

China Continent Insurance Co., Ltd. is a national property and casualty insurer established with the approval of the State Council and China Insurance Regulatory Commission. It is also the only direct P&C insurance company under China Re Group. China Continent Insurance was established on October 15th, 2003 based in Shanghai, with registered capital of USD 2.2 billion. In 2018, the company achieved annual premium income of USD 6.2 billion, ranking the fifth in China.

China Continent Insurance achieved leaps forward in development in the sixteen years since its foundation, with a nationwide network of 35 provincial branches, one special sales unit, one shipping insurance operation center, one e-commerce company, and over 2,000 outlets at provincial, municipal, and county levels. From 2014 to 2018, the company was continuously rated by A.M. Best and received an “A” in both financial strength rating (FSR) and issuer credit rating (ICR) with stable outlooks. More information at http://www.ccic-net.com.cn/