2020年经济学人 平安--变形计(1)（在线收听）

Ping An

平安

Metamorphosis

变形计

The world's most valuable insurer has transformed itself into a fintech super-app. Could others follow its lead?

这家全球最具价值的保险公司已转型为金融科技超级应用。其他国家能效仿吗？

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. 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.

在平安进行工作面试是一种奇怪的经历。要成为这家全球市值最大的保险集团的代理，候选人必须接受一台智能机器的提问。当他们做出回应时，他们的声音、措辞和手势都会被仔细检查，以确定他们是否具备最高效的销售人员的品质。在从数百万次这样的面试中收集数据后，该公司相信它的人工智能(AI)系统能够迅速挖出人才，剔除无用之人。从该公司的代理生产力得分来看，它正在发挥作用。

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. 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.

正如招聘工具提供了一窥未来招聘的机会一样，平安本身可能也提供了一扇了解金融业未来的窗口。该工具只是该集团工程师大军开发的数千个应用程序之一。它们支撑着一系列庞大的服务，从保险和银行到医疗保健和教育，仅今年就有近6亿人使用这些服务。在如此大规模的技术开发和应用方面，世界上没有其他任何一家传统金融服务集团能与平安匹敌。

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. 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; see chart 1), and has redefined itself as a technology conglomerate built around an insurance business. It is now the largest investor in HSBC.

这家公司由马彼得创立，最初是深圳一家国有企业的一个小单位，向老板推销工人赔偿保险。该公司最终于1988年解散。到2000年代中期，它已经成为中国最大的人寿和财产保险公司之一，同时吸引了汇丰银行的投资。如今，它的价值为人民币1.5万亿元(2360亿美元)，并重新定义自己为一家以保险业务为基础的科技集团。它现在是汇丰最大的投资者。