(本文选自《经济学人》20201205期)
背景介绍：
诞生于1988年的中国平安集团最初只是一家专注于财产险业务的并不起眼的小公司，但在短短的40年间便已发展成为金融保险、银行、投资等金融业务为一体的整合、紧密、多元的综合金融服务集团，更是当之无愧的行业龙头老大。那么，平安集团究竟是如何取得如此成就的？
How Ping An, an insurer, became a fintech super-app
Could others follow the Chinese firm’s lead?
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.
在平安保险面试是一种奇妙的经历。想要成为这家全球市值最大的保险集团的业务员，你必须面对一台智能机器的提问。当这些面试者回答问题时，智能机器便会对他们的声音、措辞和手势进行仔细评估，以确定其是否具备专业销售人员的素质。
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.
在收集了数百万次面试的数据后，平安保险相信这套人工智能系统能够帮助公司迅速发现人才，并淘汰庸者。从该公司业务员的业绩来看，这套系统确实有效。
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.
正如该招聘工具可以让人们窥见招聘的未来，平安集团本身也能够为人们打开一扇了解金融业未来的窗口。该招聘工具只是该集团工程师团队开发的数千个应用程序中的一个。
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.
他们为从保险和银行到医疗保健和教育的一系列服务提供技术支撑，仅在今年就有近6亿人使用了这些服务。就如此大规模的技术和应用开发而言，世界上没有哪一家传统金融服务公司能与平安集团相匹敌。
The firm, set up by Peter Ma, began life as a small unit at a state-owned enterprise in Shenzhen, selling bosses insurance against worker-compensation claims. It was eventually
spun out
in 1988.
这家由马明哲创办的公司最初是深圳一家国有企业的一个小部门，其主要业务是向公司老板们销售针对工人赔偿的保险。1988年，该部门最终被分拆为一家独立的公司。
By the mid-2000s it had become one of China’s largest life and property insurers, and attracted investment from HSBC, a bank. Today it is worth 1.5trn yuan ($236bn), and has redefined itself as a technology
conglomerate
built around an insurance business. It is now the largest investor in HSBC.
到2000年代中期，该公司已发展为中国最大的人寿和财产保险公司之一，并且还获得了汇丰银行的投资。如今，平安保险市值已达1.5万亿元人民币（约合2360亿美元），并将自身重新定义为一家围绕保险业务建立起来的科技集团。如今，平安保险已成为汇丰银行最大的股东。
Three things distinguish Ping An’s operating model from that of a standard insurer: its vast platform of services; its approach towards its hundreds of millions of users and customers; and,
underpinning
it all, its technological prowess. Take its array of subsidiaries first.
平安保险的运营模式与传统保险公司有着三点区别：庞大的服务平台；对待数以亿计的用户和客户的方式；以及支撑这一切的技术实力。先来看看平安保险旗下的一系列子公司。
The firm sells life and health insurance, which in the first three quarters of the year accounted for 67% of net profit. It provides health care through Good Doctor, its digital-medicine group. Customers can park their cash with Ping An’s bank or invest it through Lufax, its wealth-advisory arm (which listed in New York on October 30th). They can buy a car or sign up for education services, and then finance the payments through Ping An’s consumer-credit unit.
主营业务人寿和健康保险今年前三季度的净利润占比67%。旗下的数字医疗机构“好医生”为人们提供医疗保健服务。客户可以将现金存入平安银行，也可以通过平安旗下的财富咨询机构陆金所（已于10月30日在纽约上市）进行投资。人们还可以买车或报名参加教育培训服务，然后通过平安集团的消费信贷部门支付费用。
The sheer breadth of services on offer allows Ping An to treat customers more as a social-media firm would, rather than an insurer—the second distinctive feature of its business model. Unusually for a financial institution, Ping An considers the majority of people buying its products to be users instead of customers.
平安集团提供的服务范围之广，使其能够更像一家社交媒体公司而非保险公司那样对待客户，这正是其商业模式的第二个显著特点。不同于其他金融机构，平安集团认为，大多数购买其产品的人都是用户，而非客户。
They may buy a health service from Good Doctor or a car from Autohome, its car-purchasing app, contributing to the company’s data pool, yet remaining outside its core customer base. “You don’t have to jump through hoops. All you need to do is download our app,” says Jessica Tan, one of the group’s three co-chief executives. Only when they hold a financial product at one of the core units of the company, such as an insurance policy, do users become customers.
人们可能会从“好医生”上购买医疗服务，或者从其购车应用“汽车之家”上购买汽车，虽然为公司数据库做出了贡献，但仍在其核心客户群之外。平安集团三位联席首席执行官之一的陈心颖说道：“你无需太过费劲。你需要做的就是下载我们的应用。”只有当用户在公司的某个核心部门购买了某种金融产品（例如一份保险）时，他们才会升级为客户。
None of this would be possible without Ping An’s technological prowess—the third and by far most important ingredient of its success. AI allows cross-selling pitches to customers to be made when they are most useful, for instance. “The final sale is done by an agent but the system develops the recommendation,” says Henrik Naujoks of Bain. “And it’s done at the right time.”
但如果没有平安的技术实力，这一切都不可能实现——技术实力是其成功的第三大因素（也是最重要的一个因素）。例如，利用人工智能技术能够在最合适的时机对客户进行交叉销售。贝恩公司的亨里克·诺约克斯说：“虽然最终的销售是由业务员完成的，但系统会提出建议，以确保其在合适的时机完成。”
(红色标注词为重难点词汇)
本文翻译：Vinnie
校核：Vinnie
编辑：Vinnie
说到保险，我们耳边最熟悉的一句广告词便是“买保险就是买平安”。如今的平安集团不仅仅是一家保险公司，更是一家市值达1.5万亿元、跻身《财富》世界500强的综合金融服务集团。而平安集团成功的背后是它与其他公司不同的三大特点：庞大的服务平台；对待数以亿计的用户和客户的方式；以及支撑这一切的技术实力。
