CEO SAYS is a new program providing industry insights for startups. It aims to share CEO’s insights from different industries and help startups keep up with thoughtful observations and trends.
Today we invited Wu Ting, founder and CEO of Zuber, to share his insights in rental business in China and Liu Yang, general manager of JadeValue Beijng InsurTech Incubator, to discuss the future of InsurTech in China.
Wu Ting, Founder & CEO of Zuber, a new tech force in shanghai's rental industry.
Wu Ting says: "The big time of China's house rental begins."
Since the establishment of the mechanism of long-term housing by the central government and the release of rental policies by local governments, first-tier enterprises have already made plans for long-term house rental. We made the following predictions for the future of the rental industry -
1. Housing supply will be increased & service and user experience will be improved
As land in China can only be rent yet not be sold, many government-owned enterprises started to lead in renting their lands to make profit. More participants have joined this market to make competition more fiercely due to a robust housing supply. This trend would bring some positive results, i.e. to speed up the regularization of rental industry and help cultivate chain rental brands. The whole business would embrace regularized rental enterprises instead of small work studios.
2. The golden age of online rental begins and offline rental agencies would develop vertically
The government-owned rental platform and housing lease registration and filing policy will make leasehold more information-based and digitalized. The verification of housing resources will be more convenient with more online rental platforms. In the future, information technology will make rental business more digitalized, which improves efficiency for the whole industry.
While most rental needs can be met by online platform, offline rental agency’s core business might shift to high-end market.
3. The right of tenants is secured
Regulations on house rental are made to protect the rights of both the demand side and the supply side. By providing administration to secure rental business, government helps accelerate the prosperity of this industry.
Liu Yang, General Manager of JadeValue (Beijing) , focusing on the investment and incubation of insurtech startups.
Liu Yang Says: "Insurtech has been through three stages."
There are three stages as for the combination of insurance, technology and AI. At the first stage, traditional individual insurance agents have been replaced by online price comparison and product search platforms. At the second stage, technology， especially AI, brings innovation in every aspect of insurance value chain, from early product design, underwriting to claim settlement and services. The third stage is still hard to achieve in China while it is being widely explored in foreign countries. In this stage, technology brings innovation of business model in insurance industry. That would be a blue ocean market, but it will take a long time to allow new technology fully shift current business model. We are seeing a trend.
AI will be one fundamental technology with wide applications in the future. It will be as ubiquitous as mobile web and mobile payment, used in various areas and sections in the whole internet business. When mentioned about insurtech, it might not be the most popular topic in internet finance or internet business. However, all industries need insurance and this old industry is in great demand for quantization. To buy an insurance product nowadays, customers need to establish trust with the salesperson first and gain necessary knowledge of the product. Then, they may worry about being cheated by some recessive terms and pitfalls. Insurance should be customized for every customer in the future. And product recommendation and pricing strategy should be decided based on different customer segments. The only thing customers need to do is just to say 'yes' or 'no.' It requires long-term efforts from many companies and even the whole industry to achieve this goal. I think that AI is very promising.
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