Ping an Approves the Creation of a New-Generation Open and Innovative AI Platform

OneConnect Showcases Several Futuristic Technologies at WAIC

2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), a conference bringing together the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, formally raised the curtain on August 29. The conference attracted industry leaders and cutting-edge technologies from both within China as well as many different countries and regions around the world. OneConnect, a leading technology-as-a-service platform for financial institutions in China, showcased several futuristic technologies at the conference, showcasing to the industry its scientific and technological capabilities alongside results in empowerment.

At the conference, Li Meng, Vice Minister of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, announced ten open and innovative AI platforms that had been approved at the state level. Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (“Ping An Group” or “the group”) was the only financial institution approved to create one of the new national AI open innovation platforms (financial inclusion). On behalf of the group, co-CEO Chen Xinying was present at the conference and received the license from the Ministry of Science and Technology to create the platform. OneConnect, an associate of Ping An Group with rich experience in the financial industry, will be the main participant in the creation and management of the platform, empowering it with technologies.

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During the event, OneConnect demonstrated advances in text reading comprehension and intelligent customer service, among other AI technologies. Leveraging a combination of named entity recognition (NER), Sequence Labeling, Transformer and QANet, the text reading comprehension technology identifies and extracts multi-granularity fields from the target text document in order to generate the logical structure of a complex text intelligently. The highly customized text reading comprehension model, which integrates the Chinese-language environment with the legal context, analyzes legal documents accurately and efficiently. People who lack the expertise cannot be expected to understand a legal document consisting of thousands of words in a short time. At the booth, the company demonstrated the text reading comprehension technology’s capability in instantly making a complex document clear and easy-to-understand by scanning and analyzing the key words and word classes within the document based on a given logic. The technology can even handle versions of a document captured as an image using a smartphone.

Intelligent customer service is one of the AI technologies highly relevant to conference attendees. An unavoidable aspect of life today is that one finds oneself obliged to converse with a machine rather than a human being when phoning large organizations. OneConnect also demonstrated multiple round dialogue and semantic comprehension technologies at the booth. The smart machine proved to be perfectly capable of understanding what the attendee was saying as well as to provide written responses and even deliver an analysis of the results based on the corresponding logic. With the emotion recognition technology, an intelligent call-out robot helps reduce the number of complaints processed manually, supplying a solution that enhances business efficiency by perceiving the customer’s change in emotions during the course of the interaction. The service can be applied in several financial service scenarios, including standard responses to clients that are a part of customer service operations, new product recommendations, repayment reminders, customer follow-up calls and surveys. Replacing the majority of customer service actions that are manual in nature with robots helps reduce labor costs and improve the service efficiency of the call center.

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OneConnect, using multiple AI technologies including text reading comprehension and intelligent customer service, integrates various financial business scenarios and applies them in businesses such as insurance, customs and investment. The lineup of quick payment, cross-border trade financing and other kinds of smart contracts showcased at the conference drew the attention of many attendees who stopped by and expressed interest through their many questions. Supported by blockchain and AI technologies, the OneConnect smart contract cloud platform is based on the full life cycle management of contracts typically used by financial institutions and provides intelligent solutions culminating in the intelligent management of and application to contracts. At present, more than 20 intelligent tools and services have been developed on the platform, including automatic contract generation, intelligent document analysis, automated backfilling of information on standardized forms, blockchain certificates of deposit, intelligent recognition and identification, intelligent contract execution, creation of company profiles, issuing of risk alerts and public opinion monitoring, to help financial institutions effectively reduce contract risks and costs, while improving transaction and operational efficiency.

In addition to AI, OneConnect also demonstrated a futuristic technology — 3D zero-knowledge verification technology using blockchain. This technology delivers “data availability” on the premise of guaranteeing privacy, solving the privacy challenge faced by a large amount of data involved in AI model training. The technology has massive potential as an application in supply chain finance, trade finance, business investment and other scenarios.

OneConnect, as the unit within Ping An Group responsible for the creation and promotion of the firm’s “finance + technology” approach to many of the solutions being sought in today’s business environment, makes its leading technologies and solutions available to the industry, endowing financial institutions not only with new business capabilities, but also enhanced operation and management competencies, helping the institutions to engage in both internal and external improvements, while promoting their intelligent transformation.

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