Recently, CPIC Life Insurance announced that on April 1, after the deliberation and approval of the 43rd meeting of the 7th board of directors (provisional), Cai Qiang no longer served as the company's general manager (CEO). During the vacancy of the position of general manager of CPIC Life, Pan Yanhong was appointed as the interim person in charge and acted as the general manager. The above adjustments will not have a material impact on CPIC Life's business operations and financial condition.
In fact, Cai Qiang's departure is not unexpected, because when he joined CPIC Life Insurance in 2021, Cai Qiang's tenure was three years. And when the time comes to 2024, the news about Cai Qiang's departure will naturally spread in the market.
In the annual results of CPIC in March this year, Fu Fan, chairman of the company, said that in April 2021, the board of directors of life insurance appointed Cai Qiang as the CEO of CPIC Life Insurance in accordance with the principle of specialization and marketization, and at the same time in accordance with the rules of tenure system and contract. After joining CPIC Life, Cai Qiang actively integrated into the company's culture, brought advanced life insurance marketing concepts, and worked with the company's existing management team to promote the construction of a high-quality agent team, making positive contributions to the transformation of life insurance "long voyage". The selection of the new management of CPIC Life will continue to uphold the principles of professionalism and market-oriented. If there is further information in the next step, we will keep in touch with you in a timely manner.
This statement basically confirmed the rumors that Cai Qiang left CPIC Life Insurance, and now the news has also officially landed. Looking back on Cai Qiang's three-year career in CPIC, there were many difficulties inside and outside the industry, and CPIC Life Insurance set off a wave of reform within it. For Cai Qiang himself, this is a rather difficult three years, and it is also a full harvest of three years.
1
Proud resume, airborne "strongest external brain",
Cai Qiang accompanied CPIC through the industry trough for three years
Cai Qiang officially joined CPIC Life in March 2021. At that time, Cai Qianggang left AIA in January 2020, where he had worked for 11 years, and spent less than a year in the position of vice chairman and president of WeDoctor. Joining CPIC Life Insurance this time was once pinned on by the market and was known as the strongest "external brain".
The reason why the market is so optimistic about Cai Qiang is that he is a real insurance "veteran". Born in 1967, Cai Qiang graduated from Xi'an Jiaotong University and began his insurance career in the United States at the age of 24. After more than a decade in insurance sales in New York, Chua returned to Asia in 2003 as Chief Acting Director of AXA Hong Kong and was appointed Chief Executive Officer of AXA Hong Kong four years later.
In 2009, Cai Qiang officially joined AIA, which was also the most dazzling experience of his career. He has been the CEO of AIA China since 2009 and is responsible for all aspects of AIA's life insurance business in the Chinese market. In June 2017, he was appointed Regional Chief Executive Officer, responsible for AIA's operations in Chinese mainland, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan and Myanmar.
During his 11-year tenure at AIA, Cai Qiang vigorously promoted the reform of AIA China's marketer system and the rapid development of regional life insurance value business, leading AIA China to triple the value of new business in five years, of which the after-tax operating profit of AIA's Chinese mainland business increased by 38%, 28%, 29%, 39%, 32% and 28% respectively from 2014 to 2019.
It is true that 2014-2019 is also the golden period for the rapid development of the domestic insurance industry, and for AIA, such achievements are not only the beta given by the industry, but also the alpha achieved by itself.
Its advanced marketer system has also become a benchmark in the industry, and the elite model has attracted imitation from peers. In fact, the spontaneous life insurance reform carried out by the insurance industry in recent years, especially for the improvement of the quality and deficiency of the agent side, is somewhat similar to the agent elite model promoted by AIA at that time.
And this is also the reason why CPIC chose Cai Qiang, with nearly 30 years of experience, a successful past, and presided over the main work of a large insurance company, all of which paved the way for Cai Qiang to enter CPIC.
Looking back on Cai Qiang's three-year CPIC career, it can be described as agitation. In terms of the external environment, the impact of the epidemic has almost run through his entire tenure, and the industry is therefore in a trough cycle, while the internal environment, the life insurance industry has set off the largest life insurance reform in many years, the number of agents has declined sharply, and various agent quality improvement plans in the industry have emerged one after another. Therefore, for Cai Qiang, these three years have been three years of great burden and difficulty.
2
Operation Long Voyage 1.0 has been successfully completed, and the 2.0 era may need "newcomers" to lead the team
Cai Qiang's core work in the past three years is to vigorously and continuously promote the CPIC's long-haul action.
At the beginning of 2021, CPIC Life officially released the "Long Voyage Action", according to the official introduction of CPIC Life Insurance, the Long Voyage Action should highlight its own "long-term concept", aiming to uphold the concept of long-termism, with the vision of "building a life insurance company with the best service experience and being a long-term advocate in the life insurance industry", adhere to high-quality development, adhere to customer-centricity, adhere to scientific and technological innovation, adhere to people-oriented, and strive to build an excellent insurance company.
Under the new market situation, the target group of the insurance industry has gradually changed from the post-60s, post-70s to post-80s and even post-90s, which means that the industry needs a group of higher-quality, more professional insurance agents.
In addition, the transformation and upgrading of the product side is also an important part of the Changhang Action 1.0, CPIC pointed out that it is necessary to build a hierarchical matching "product + service golden triangle" supply system guided by customer needs, with "wealth", "health" and "pension" as the fulcrum, while giving full play to the value of the main business products while enriching the service ecosystem, to provide customers with differentiated insurance solutions.
Cai Qiang's arrival has also brought a lot of new life insurance business ideas to CPIC. For example, in terms of the attitude towards a good start, Cai Qiang put forward a different view from the domestic mainstream insurance companies, that is, he advocated diluting the effect of a good start. At the 2023 interim results conference, Cai Qiang said: CPIC Life Insurance has emphasized for two consecutive years that it will not make a "good start" or "move premiums", but focus on treating every day as a "good start". At present, CPIC Life Insurance has slowly stepped out of the path of relying on the promotion of "good start" after transformation, and has formed a normalized model of visiting, selling and recruiting. In the future, we will continue to focus on normalized operation, normalized sales, and normalized recruitment, create a model of stable monthly orders and sales, and carry out life insurance reform in accordance with the established strategy.
Returning to the Changhang Action 1.0, since the implementation of the action, CPIC Life Insurance has achieved three consecutive increases in premium income during the relatively difficult trough period of the industry, of which the premium income in 2021, 2022 and 2023 will be 211.685 billion yuan, 222.342 billion yuan and 233.141 billion yuan respectively, which is not easy to achieve.
At the same time, in terms of the agent team, when Cai Qiang officially entered the CPIC, the average monthly number of agents in the CPIC was 525,000, and when Cai Qiang left, the average number of agents per month dropped to 210,000, a decrease of 60%. However, the quality of the agent team has undergone tremendous changes, among which the average monthly first-year premium per capita of insurance marketers was RMB12,837, an increase of 51.8% year-on-year, and the average monthly first-year commission income per capita of core manpower was RMB6,051, an increase of 46.3% year-on-year.
At CPIC's 2022 results conference held last year, Cai Qiang said that since the implementation of the long-haul action for 18 months, it has basically met the expected results of the management, and all projects have been implemented in place, whether it is individual insurance or multiple channels, including customer service, product + service, etc.
At the same time, Cai Qiang also mentioned the relevant plans for the Long Voyage Action 2.0, and the next step is to further deepen the transformation to release the subjective initiative and enthusiasm of institutions at all levels. Through the reengineering of the liberation of production relations, the productivity will be further released, and the professionalization, specialization and digitalization of the supporting field will further improve the entire management structure and the professionalism of the internal staff.
In short, it is necessary to reform the internal links so that the internal team can better support the external team.
At the 2023 third quarter results conference, Cai Qiang mentioned that so far, the top-level design of the second phase of the "Long Voyage Action" project has been completed, and the streamlining of the headquarters has basically ended.
"The reengineering of our headquarters processes and the streamlining and optimization of the provincial agencies are expected to be completed by the end of the year, so the current progress is in line with expectations. It is expected that in the next 18 months, the human resources will be further optimized, the organizational effectiveness will be further improved, and the responsibilities and capacity building of the enabling headquarters and operating institutions will be implemented. Cai Qiang said.
Cai Qiang was hired by CPIC three years ago because of his impressive achievements in agent reform, and now the CPIC agent reform has entered a new stage, and the next step of reform will be mainly carried out in the internal team. What is the next step in the long-term voyage operation? What is the strategic continuity of CPIC life insurance transformation? These have become topics of concern to many people.
3
Premiums in the first quarter were weak, and the new management needed to come up with more proposals
In the current market environment, CPIC is also facing considerable pressure. A few days ago, CPIC announced the premium situation for the first quarter of this year, and the data showed that the original insurance business income of CPIC Life Insurance in the first quarter of this year was 91.686 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 5.4%. In horizontal comparison, among the five listed life insurance companies in China, Chinese Life Insurance and Ping An Life Insurance achieved positive growth in premiums, with growth rates of 3.22 and 0.9% respectively, while the other three Taibao Life Insurance, PICC Life Insurance and Xinhua Insurance all experienced a decline in premiums, with declines of -5.4%, -8.2% and -11.7% respectively.
In October 2023, the regulator issued the "Notice on Strengthening Management to Promote the Stable and Healthy Development of Life Insurance Business" to all life insurance companies, requiring the prohibition of large-scale pre-collection, the scientific formulation of annual budgets and reasonable planning of annual development tasks by insurance companies.
Among them, Xinhua's bancassurance channel premiums accounted for 28.8% of the total premiums in 2023, while the premiums of CPIC Life Insurance also accounted for 15.1% of the total premiums, which will inevitably be affected under the new regulations.
In addition to the difficulties of the current decline in premiums, the problems faced by life insurance companies, including CPIC, such as channel transformation and interest rate spread risk, are the problems that the industry needs to face for a long time. On the one hand, these problems are related to the basic survival risk of insurance companies, and on the other hand, they are related to the development challenge of making the cake bigger. Especially in recent years, insurance companies of all sizes are going through continuous executive changes, and in the midst of frequent personnel changes, should they continue the established strategy or make continuous adjustments?
In the face of these long-term problems, a longer-term perspective and solutions are needed to solve them. Cai Qiang once said in an interview with the media that it is necessary to "turn the values of integrity and long-termism into a compass for transformation", and we will continue to pay attention to how the new leadership team of CPIC will continue to promote the Long Voyage Action 2.0 and how CPIC will embark on a new round of growth.