Online health insurer sees enormous potential

China's first online insurer, ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance, launched its latest mid-range medical insurance product on Wednesday, targeting the fast-growing sector.

Mid-end medical insurance is about to enter a high-speed development stage, mainly due to the expanding demands of China's middle-class consumers.

According to ZhongAn, the total size of the market in this field is expected to reach 20 billion yuan ($3.2 billion) by 2018. The company's data showed that from 2015 to 2017, the proportion of mid-range medical health insurance market premiums increased from 0.2 to 1.8 percent of the total health market, suggesting huge development space and potential.

According to a report released in 2017 by PricewaterhouseCoopers, insurance companies were most actively focused on financial technology.

Treating it as a vital engine for innovation in medical insurance, ZhongAn has deployed AI, big data and other technologies to upgrade product processes and service experience.

"In 2020, the market size for mid-end medical insurance will further expand to 80 billion yuan, and the market share will increase to 6.9 percent," predicted Tan Tengyue, product director at ZhongAn's health insurance division.

"In the future, with the deepening of technology applications and connectivity, we hope to provide each of our mid-end medical insurance users with a personalized one-stop healthcare service," Tan said.

Niu Yilin contributed to this story