Where will the “Three Heroes of Shenzhen” go at the crossroads of global competition?

This large-scale comprehensive financial group, which has businesses spanning insurance, banking, and investment and holds financial licenses in all fields, has used "technology" as the main driving force for its development during several organizational changes. In his New Year's speech in 2013, Ma Mingzhe, chairman of the group, mentioned several times that "we are facing challenges in the era of mobile Internet and big data" and proposed that "the biggest competitor we face is not the financial industry, but Internet companies."

From the founding of Ping An Insurance in 1988 to 1996, Ping An's IT construction was no different from other companies, mainly based on simple stand-alone and database applications. But after the introduction of McKinsey in 1997, it first proposed the idea of ​​using technology to transform the system, that is, using IT technology to achieve database centralization. In July 2000, financial IT expert Yan Richang designed the first unified call center in mainland China for Ping An. This call center was located in Suzhou and had 300 employees. It was considered a crazy move at the time. But now call centers have long become the basic configuration of financial institutions.

In 2002, Ma Mingzhe promoted the "second technological revolution" to transform financial processes, using IT technology to centralize a large amount of work in the front-end business hall and realize standardized and process-based back-end support and data operations. The advantages of back-end support are obvious. The resources originally scattered in various regions and account managers were unified at the headquarters, which not only strengthened management but also achieved in-depth mining and utilization.

Some media commented that, unlike ordinary financial company leaders, Ping An Group Chairman Ma Mingzhe is a genuine "technology fan". He used Weibo and WeChat earlier than most people in Ping An, and was probably the first person to introduce BlackBerry mobile applications to Chinese financial institutions. After Apple released the iPad in 2009, Ma Mingzhe required executives to use it in their daily work, promoted mobile office, and even refused to sign internal paper documents.

Ping An's IT department began to operate as a company in 2008, and Ping An Technology was established. In 2013, Ping An took the initiative to build IT capabilities such as mobile Internet, cloud, and big data, and prepared to build a financial big data platform. In 2016, Ping An started business transfer and invested its energy in more cutting-edge technological innovation research such as artificial intelligence, big data, and blockchain. Today, technology has become Ping An's financial central nervous system, empowering financial business in all aspects.

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Last August, academicians and experts attending the 12th China Engineering Management (Smart City) Forum made a special trip to the headquarters of Tencent, Huawei and Ping An to conduct research and learn about Shenzhen's technology and research results in the field of smart cities.

Shenzhen is one of the first batch of new smart city pilot cities in the country. It has built a unified urban comprehensive information data platform and implemented a series of people-oriented projects such as smart transportation, smart education, smart medical care, smart ocean, and smart communities.

At present, Tencent's smart city service has established extensive cooperation with more than 150 cities across the country, involving smart cities, police, transportation, medical care, education, travel, new retail, business districts and other life and social scenarios. Huawei has also made smart cities one of its key business investment directions. Huawei has proposed the concept of "smart city nervous system-city operation center", deeply integrating cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things, mobile Internet, artificial intelligence and other technologies with urban scenarios. Ping An has also promoted its own more than 200 smart city services in 115 cities.

In the previous year, more than 50 senior executives from 25 small and medium-sized banks from all over the country visited Ping An Bank, Tencent, and Huawei to discuss the topic of "Future Banking and Smart Finance".

Ping An Bank set a strategic goal of transforming into a retail bank in 2016. Through the innovative SAT intelligent service model of large retail business, it accelerated the creation of Ping An's intelligent, mobile and professional retail bank. Tencent's financial business includes Tenpay, Wealth Management, Tencent Credit, communication and lottery business, and Micro Gold. Huawei, which seems to have nothing to do with financial business, actually has Huawei Enterprise BG Financial System Department.

Now it seems that these are all very interesting moments. Three small companies founded at different times and entering different industries have become model companies for smart city construction decades later, collaborating and competing in the financial, retail, medical and other industries. Moreover, they all position themselves as platforms and propose to "empower" other industries.

"In the future digital transformation of all industries, the transformation and upgrading that takes their destiny into their own hands is the real transformation and upgrading," said Ma Huateng. "We are not stealing other people's jobs. Instead, we provide them with better and newer tools so that they can do better. There are a lot of new entrepreneurial opportunities here."

In an interview with the media, Ping An Group Co-CEO Sylvia Chan also mentioned that Ping An wants to build itself into an open platform and form its own ecosystem in finance, health, cars, houses, smart cities, etc. Because finance is only a part of life, people do not take loans for the sake of taking loans, but because they want to buy cars, houses, and consume, which is embedded in life scenes.

At this year's shareholders' meeting, Ping An's chairman Ma Mingzhe mentioned that in the past 10 years, Ping An has used technology to rapidly improve the competitiveness of its financial business. Now, Ping An has another important task. In the next 10 years, it will implement the strategic tone of "technology empowering finance, technology empowering ecology, and ecology empowering finance", and use technology to consolidate its main business internally and empower different circles externally.

"The starting point of building an ecosystem is to serve customers in an all-round and in-depth manner, while obtaining rigid traffic and entrances, improving competitiveness, and providing services to the country and society. Under this strategy, Ping An has formed five major ecosystems including finance, medical care, real estate, transportation, and smart cities, and continues to explore the fields of financial technology and medical technology." Chen Xinying introduced that now, the entire group has 32 companies, 11 of which are technology companies, with 99,000 scientific and technological personnel.

Ping An has demonstrated its technical capabilities in many fields. For example, in September last year, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority launched a trade finance network that supports blockchain technology, connecting 21 banks including Standard Chartered. Ping An defeated companies such as Accenture and R3 to become its only technology provider.

The three companies have achieved the same goal through different paths. Relying on the power of science and technology, they have grown into the "Three Heroes of Shenzhen". At the crossroads of global competition, the key moments in their growth may provide some reference and lessons for answering the question of where Chinese companies are going.