Ping An Insurance Group Co., China’s largest insurer and one of the country’s largest financial conglomerates, routinely scans the faces of customers and its own agents to verify their identities or examine their expressions for clues about their truthfulness.
Ping An uses its facial-recognition technology mainly to verify customers’ identities. After setting up the accounts, customers can purchase some life- and health-insurance products after scanning their faces with their smartphones. Shi Haojing, a 28-year-old airport worker in Shanghai, says she scans her face with her smartphone camera when she needs to speak with an insurance agent and collect or make payments on her Ping An policies.
Cliff Sheng, a Hong Kong-based partner at consulting firm Oliver Wyman who has closely studied uses of technology by Chinese insurance companies, argues that there are more reliable ways than facial recognition to acquire users’ BMI. However, Mr. Sheng does say he thinks that the technology can be useful to insurers as a marketing tool because it gets people’s attention.
In its lending business, meanwhile, Ping An says it uses its technology to analyze the faces of loan applicants in real time, searching for “micro-expressions” that reveal their emotional and psychological state.
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