Alipay can't hold back, and the network mutual aid platform has finally become a thing of the past
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Author | Li Yangxia
On December 28, the mutual treasure announcement said that the mutual aid program will stop running on January 28. On the date of the announcement, members no longer participate in mutual aid sharing. Sick members diagnosed before the shutdown can still initiate a mutual aid application, and the mutual aid fund will be borne by the mutual treasure platform.
Since its launch in 2018, Mutual Treasure has accumulated more than 100 million registered users, becoming the world's largest mutual aid platform.
Since the beginning of this year, many mutual aid platforms such as Meituan Mutual Aid, WaterDrop Mutual Aid, and Easy Mutual Aid have announced their closure. It seems that even the mutual treasure that relies on the big tree of Ali has not been spared in the end.
As early as 2020, the Baidu mutual aid platform was shut down, and the number of members of the Baidu lighting mutual aid platform participating in the registration in the first year was less than 500,000, so the mutual insurance platform was closed in August 2020.
Meanwhile, Droplet Insurance, backed by Tencent Holdings, closed its mutual aid business on March 31. In May, Waterdrop Insurance raised $360 million in an initial public offering (IPO) in New York.
On February 1 this year, the takeaway giant Meituan closed the Meituan mutual aid platform, which had been operating for 18 months.
The network mutual aid platform essentially has the characteristics of commercial insurance, but there is no clear regulatory body and regulatory standards, and it is in an embarrassing situation of no one supervising.
Looking back at 2018, the products launched by Ant and Xinmei Life insurance exceeded 20 million users in more than a month. However, less than 50 days after its launch, the product was suspended by the regulator for allegedly failing to use the ICP Filing terms and rates as required.
On November 27 of the same year, Xinmei withdrew from each other, and "Mutual Insurance" was renamed "Mutual Treasure", and the operating entity was also changed to Alipay. Mutual insurance is insurance, while mutual treasure is a network mutual aid plan, which is also crowned as the aura of "financial innovation", and the target users are groups that cannot be covered by commercial insurance, especially in third- and fourth-tier cities and rural areas.
In the first year of mutual treasure operation, each member paid an average premium of 29.17 yuan, which is lower than the price of a Starbucks coffee. Last year, Ant Group set a maximum fee of $188 per member and expanded its services to provide free coverage of up to $100,000 for Covid-19 treatment.
As a class claims mechanism that provides basic health plans for those facing critical illness, the mutual aid platform is popular among low- and middle-income families in rural China, who often lack high-quality hospitals and good medical care.
Members can only share the cost of the claim after the claim has been verified, so 1,000 people participating in the program will each receive a medical claim of $1,000, each of which will be charged $1.
Since 2019, due to the increasingly high cost of sharing, coupled with the frequent problem of denial of compensation, mutual treasure has been pushed to the forefront.
Looking back at Ant Financial's 2020 moments before its listing, it was pressed the pause button by the regulatory authorities. In January this year, Yin Ming, vice president of Ant Group and president of Ant Group's insurance business group, left his post, becoming the first executive to leave after the regulatory authorities suppressed the financial technology industry.
In December 2020, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission issued a document recommending stricter regulation of the sale of insurance products on the Internet.
Online mutual insurance platforms do not have licenses and therefore face a range of regulations. At present, because network mutual aid has the attribute of commercial insurance and the number of participants is large, some pre-charging model platforms form precipitated funds, and there are financial risks, so shutdown is inevitable.
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