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Case Study

Ping An: How a Chinese insurance firm became a tech giant (B)

By Howard H. Yu, Yunfei Feng and Anouk Lavoie Orlick

8 pages

November 2020

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Reference: IMD-7-2243

While Ping An is so successful to transform and reinvent itself to a tech giant, it discovered the demand of small and medium sized financial institutions to deploy technology. In December 2015, Ping An set up OneConnect, a fintech spinoff, to export its internal technology and repackage them as services to other banks and insurance companies in China. Case (B) is about how Ping An incubated OneConnect and development of OneConnect. OneConnect is in an expansion phase, growing from its Chinese client base to offer its cloud-based services across Asia. At the beginning it relied very much on Ping An in terms of technology, people and other resources, and became more and more independently later on. OneConnect turned out to be a unicorn and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2019.

Learning Objective

Identify the mind-set of a leadership team that looks beyond typical short-term planning horizons

Keywords

Digital, Digital Transformation, Start-up, Incubation, Transformational Leadership, Transformation

Settings

Asia Pacific, China
Ping An Insurance, Finance and Insurance
1988-2020

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

Related material

Teaching note, Video

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