Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com will soon launch an online insurance service, it has been reported.
The firm will expand into the insurance market as it looks to top Alibaba as China’s largest business-to-customer business by 2021, The South China Morning Post reports.
At the annual meeting of the company last week, chief executive, Richard Liu Qiangdong, said that the firm will push into insurance and also move into the online brokerage space and internet banking.
Want the latest insurance industry news first? Sign up for our completely free newsletter service now.
“The transactions of JD Finance have grown more than eight times over the past three years, exceeding 1 trillion yuan in 2016,” Liu said.
“We aim to make JD Finance one of the top three fintech companies in the world by 2020, serving thousands of financial institutions and millions of enterprises.”
Other details were thin on the ground but Liu said that he sees big data-enabled technology as a way for the firm to provide individualised financial services for each customer, and pointed to on-demand insurance services based on individual need, the report continued.
In October last year, JD Finance was ranked tenth in KPMG’s Fintech 100 firms to watch over the next year.
With Ant Financial controlled by Alibaba chief Jack Ma, it looks as though the insurance industry could become a battleground for e-commerce over the coming years.
Related stories:
Brokers ‘can’t put their heads in the sand’ on insurtech
Chinese state-owned insurer inks procurement deal with e-commerce firm
