Wen 丨 Pingxiang
Compared with the 2021 "opening red" launched by a number of large and small life insurance companies in 2020, the "opening red" in 2022 is quite silent, and it has not been until recently that the relevant actions have been seen one after another.
Lenovo last year, some of the head enterprises as early as September has been a soldier, and too many people in the industry intentionally or unintentionally revealed that insurance companies want to change their business concepts, improve quality and efficiency of the frequent voice, have made people have a "opening red" began to fade, cool down, the importance is not as good as before.
This judgment may be premature. After all, preparing for the "opening red" side around November is the normal state of the past "opening red", and the origin of the above sound is that the "opening red" in 2021 is too abnormal. Due to the impact of the epidemic in 2020, some mainstream companies have secretly abandoned the task of that year to achieve and prepared for 2021 in advance, creating the earliest "opening red" in history.
In fact, in recent years, the downplay of the "opening red" has been frequently mentioned, almost becoming the biggest "political correctness" in the industry, but is there really the courage to take that step?
Since the beginning of this year, the market situation has been increasingly severe, the loss of personnel, the lack of growth, the reform of personal insurance has not seen a substantial breakthrough, and several listed insurance companies have even generally declined in important operating indicators such as premiums, profits and value in the first three quarters. The "opening red" is not only a key business period for insurance companies to stabilize their market position and premium foundation, and to gain more breathing for the pain of transformation, but also the best battlefield to test the achievements of their respective insurance reforms. To a certain extent, in the increasing competition in the industry market, this is still a big showdown on transformation.
In the seemingly quiet "opening red" of 2022, the news of various companies launching new products, deploying manpower development, and mobilizing programs has continued to appear, which not only means that the "opening red" is also the "heart of Sima Zhao" of each life insurance company, but also superimposes all the efforts of too many insurance companies since the transformation. All these make the "opening red" of 2020 full of hope and struggle, and cruel.
The orthodoxy of life insurance lies in individual insurance, and the orthodoxy of personal insurance lies in the agent. The transformation of agents is the top priority of personal insurance reform.
According to the 2021 semi-annual reports of five A-share listed life insurance companies:
The total manpower of individual insurance channels decreased by more than 800,000 compared with the beginning of the year. In the third quarter, the overall life insurance manpower decline continued, for example, Chinese Life's personal insurance manpower has fallen below one million to 980,000, and Ping An Life has also dropped from 877,800 in the middle of the year to 706,200.
The tactics of the sea of people who once went in and out of the sea have been difficult to maintain, and improving the quality, production capacity and overall quality of agents has become the consensus of the industry.
From 2020 to 2021, more and more companies and even intermediaries have begun to play the banner of high-quality agents, launching and improving their own high-end agent programs, plans and brands, or selecting and screening in the original team, or directly setting up a separate personal insurance channel.
Although the traditional individual insurance team has still been retained and maintained a high proportion, it is clear that the focus of industry investment is tilting in the direction of high-quality personnel in an almost crazy way, and high-end agents have become the key to the success or failure of the transformation of companies.
During this period, almost all well-known life insurance companies have entered the market here:
Ping An Life's continuously upgraded "Talent Plan", Taibao Life's "CA Entrepreneur Plan", Taiping Life's launched "Ben" Plan, Taikang Life's "Healthy Wealth Planner", PICC's Insurance Wealth Planner Team, AIA's Outstanding Marketer, MetLife's "New Era Elite Plan 2.0", Zhonghong Life's Professional Pension Planner, Sunshine Life's Upgraded "Future President Plan" and specially set up a high-tech related department, and Everyone Life tested the water to launch the "Starlink Plan"...
Regardless of the form, its main features are to raise the academic qualification and age threshold of the increaser, serve the customer group with higher net worth, focus on the first- and second-tier cities, and through a certain program tilt, with the help of their own resources in science and technology, training, health management and other aspects of the resources to provide support for agents, to achieve a higher per capita, piece production capacity goals.
According to the rhythm of previous years, organizational development is generally concentrated in the second and third quarters, but after entering the fourth quarter of this year, the momentum of many companies' high-quality agent increase publicity activities has suddenly emerged, and during this period, the unique situation of "opening the door" in 2022 has been formed in a concentrated manner.
For example, Ping An Life's 2021 New Maker Conference in October launched the Ping An Recruitment "Talent" season to recruit people with certain academic qualifications and income bases to further deepen the "excellent +" elite strategy; during this period, Everyone Life set up an "MDRT Incubation Center"; Xinhua Insurance sent out the news of preparing pilot independent agents; some small and medium-sized companies, including offline intermediaries, also launched or publicized plans and activities for high-quality staff increases.
After the threshold is raised, it will inevitably bring about an increase in the difficulty of increasing the number of personnel, and the former centralized increase will gradually give way to the continuous increase in personnel when it is within the expectations of the industry. At the same time, the new agents with certain academic qualifications and economic ability have their own circles of contacts, often with similar economic status, social class and income ability, which can be said to be the middle and high net worth customers in the eyes of insurance companies:
On the one hand, the increase in the number of people themselves has a strong ability to learn and accept;
On the other hand, their interpersonal resources are relatively high-quality, which means that high-quality newcomers can quickly enter the rhythm, and it is more feasible to practice instead of war.
If so, "opening the door" is obviously the best battlefield, not only through a relatively favorable business plan to stimulate new talents to expand their careers, obtain income and promotion, and be able to retain for a long time; but also to test the quality of elite agents of various companies during this period.
This "opening red" is also bound to extend to the first industry-wide elite agent conference battle, whether it is a strong and prepared giant such as Ping An and Taibao Insurance, or foreign life insurance companies such as AIA and Zhonghong that start earlier and like to make a lot of money in a muffled voice, as well as some small and medium-sized insurance companies that look hesitant or desperate, almost all of them are involved in it. Whatever the outcome, it may open up a clear direction for this lasting transformation.
Although the "opening red" stage in 2020 and 2021, the growth rate of health insurance mainly based on serious illness insurance is far above that of life insurance, which almost drives the growth of "opening red" performance. But we should also see the reasons behind it, the sudden epidemic in 2020 stimulated people's health needs, coupled with 2021 is the window period for serious diseases and new regulations, insurance companies have taken the opportunity to carry out the traditional speculation and suspension marketing of the new regulations, which directly led to the growth of health insurance.
In essence, the sales of critical illness insurance are not within the main plan of mainstream large insurance companies when they "open the door" marketing.
This near-unexpected growth momentum has slowed rapidly after March 2021, and even some months have seen negative growth. The marketing of the new regulations on critical illnesses, which began at the end of last year, is also considered to have completely overdrafted the market potential of critical illness insurance. This also means that although companies such as Taikang and AIA have also launched critical illness insurance products for the "opening red" in 2022, it is obviously difficult for such products to become the main role again. The real protagonist will also be the life insurance product.
Life insurance products with the nature of return and savings have always been the absolute main force in the "opening red" products, from participating insurance, universal insurance, annuity insurance, to the very popular incremental whole life insurance in recent years, the mainstream products in recent years have been fine-tuned with market changes and regulatory requirements.
It can be seen from the various types of products released by various companies one after another that life insurance products with certain pension security functions, such as increased whole life insurance and annuity insurance with universal accounts, have almost become the choice of the vast majority of insurance companies in the "opening red".
For example, in the release of three 2022 "opening red" products by China Life in mid-October, except for one traditional two full insurance, the other two are annuity insurance; Ping An Life will also launch similar products for "opening red"; Taikang Life has also upgraded the "opening red" main product program of "annuity insurance + dual account"; AIA Life is also expected to focus on "wealth + pension" products in the direction of "opening red". Medium and small companies are more concentrated on increasing life insurance, and some are also deeply associated with intermediaries.
Interestingly, no matter what kind of combination of products, almost the entire industry's "opening red" product publicity has invariably played out the concept of pension, focusing on the characteristics and advantages of each product in the pension. For example, many products will relax the insurance age to 72 years old or even 75 years old, and a giant life insurance company even plays the banner of "only paying 'pension insurance' for 3 years", forming a unique 2022 pension "opening red".
On the one hand, since entering 2021, the state has continuously emphasized the third support for pension insurance, and the data of the seventh national census has also made more and more people feel anxious about the pension, which provides a good marketing atmosphere for the pension life insurance products.
On the other hand, it is to match the product strategy with the prevailing elite agent strategy.
As we all know, elite agents are closely related to serving high-net-worth customers, and high-quality pension and wealth appreciation and wealth inheritance are considered to be important aspects of the needs of medium- and high-net-worth customers.
With the function of pension savings, and the average premium and commission rate of higher annuity and increased whole life insurance, coupled with the overwhelming promotion of pension products, it is also tailored by insurance companies for the transformation strategy of high-quality agents, forming a closed loop of "elite agents + pension products + high customers" in the "opening red" in 2022, stabilizing the foundation and customer source of the team, and initially forming a virtuous circle of new transformation models.
However, the payment period of this type of annuity insurance and incremental whole life insurance is mostly for the sole payment, 3 years, 5 years, some can be seen for 8 years or 10 years, the protection period is mostly 10 years and below, it can be said that there is not much difference with the previous years of "opening red" similar products, what is the specific degree of its pension function, whether it can meet the needs of medium and high net worth customers as the insurance company thinks, whether it can really help the transformation of the agent, it needs to be handed over to the next time to test.
It can be seen from the third quarter solvency reports released by life insurance companies that most insurance companies are facing growth pressures in both premiums and profits. Looking at small and medium-sized life insurance companies, there are not a few negative growthrs. It can be seen that whether it is a head enterprise or a small and medium-sized company, one by one confirms the reality of the reduction in the number of agents, the decline in the value of new orders and values, coupled with financial and solvency pressures, the transformation slogan that has been shouted for many years still needs a certain period of time to see results.
Even if the present is the time when companies have the most unified opinions on transformation and are the most prepared, even if many companies are unlikely to complete this year's annual tasks, so that they cannot have too much publicity and publicity about the "opening red" in 2022, but this "opening red" may have to be fought.
The reason is that while the number of traditional agents has decreased and the grass-roots institutions at the county level have been drastically abolished, the increase in the number of high-quality agents of insurance companies is generally concentrated in large and medium-sized cities, and the competition area has been further reduced, and even the target customers and target customers of the increase have become more overlapping. This marks that whether it is the market, team or customer will be more limited, from the traditional volume of increase in personnel to the volume of high quality, more fierce competition between insurance companies will be inevitable.
At present, it seems that the progress of high-quality increase in personnel is difficult to make up for the premium gap caused by the decline in the number of agents, and marketing outlets such as serious illness switching are also encounterable and unattainable, and it is foreseeable that no matter what the "opening red" looks like, the pressure on insurance companies will increase unabated. No matter how good the future depicted by high-quality transformation, not everyone can get that ticket in the process of transformation.
In July this year, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) criticized some companies with aggressive sales rhythms during the "opening red" period in accordance with the Notice on Strengthening Standardized Management and Promoting the Stable Development of the Annual Business of Life Insurance Companies issued at the end of last year. Cools down the tone and rhythm of the "opening red".
Subsequently, the local bureaus also began to remove the tweets of historical issues such as self-insured pieces, and once again deliberately cooled down the "opening". However, the "opening bonus" is still a temptation for life insurers to premiums, and it is also an important source of income for agents. After all, no one can afford to "open the door", suddenly customers, teams, and markets are all people's.
Of course, from the perspective of long-term transformation strategy, this is only a tactical issue, but it will also be an important tactic that will affect the outcome of the war.