Which words can describe an industry that is on the cusp? The crowds competed, and the gunpowder was filled.
Network mutual assistance is such an industry. From the sprouting of the idea of the public security model in 2011 to giants such as Ant Group, Meituan, Baidu, Sina, and Didi competing to join the game, the network mutual assistance industry has grown rapidly. At the peak of the industry's development, network mutual assistance once reached the state of "a new platform is established every day".
The performance of the data can corroborate this grand occasion. According to the survey data of Nankai University, as of the end of May 2020, 330 million people in my country have joined the network mutual aid platform, the cumulative mutual aid fund scale is about 9.239 billion yuan, and the number of aid recipients exceeds 70,000. In 2016, fewer than 20 million members joined the network.
However, just as the online mutual assistance platform was advancing, the development trend of the industry took a sharp turn.
At 18:00 on March 26, Waterdrop officially announced that the original mutual aid plan will be officially terminated at 18:00 on March 31, 2021. Before this, members who were unfortunately diagnosed with a serious illness can continue to apply for 180 days from the date of the first diagnosis. If they meet the original mutual assistance conditions, the platform will provide reasonable compensation. For the balance in the user's account, the platform will initiate a refund within 5 days from the announcement date.
This is the fourth mutual assistance platform that has been shut down after Baidu Mutual Assistance, Meituan Mutual Assistance, and Easy Mutual Assistance. Up to now, the only mutual assistance platform of the domestic Top3 is the "mutual treasure" of the Ant Group (the other two are the "Water Drop Mutual Assistance" and "Easy Mutual Assistance" that have just been closed).
At this point, a network mutual aid industry that has gone forward vigorously for ten years has ushered in a turning point.
Behind this is related to the increasingly strict regulatory environment. In September last year, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission issued the "Illegal Commercial Insurance Activities Analysis and Countermeasures and Suggestions", naming a large number of network mutual assistance platform members, which are non-licensed operations. Stakeholder risks cannot be ignored. Some pre-charging model platforms have formed precipitation funds. There is a risk of running off the road, and if it is not handled properly or managed, it may also cause social risks.
Faced with the challenge, will other platforms shut down or continue? Can the network mutual assistance business be restarted in the future? These are issues of concern both inside and outside the industry. However, these issues remain to be resolved before the regulatory policy is clear.
But what is worth thinking about is that if an industry can rush into the market for many years, it must have its hidden value. What is the value of network mutual assistance? What is the logic of the competition between giants and capital? What kind of evolution is possible in the future?
Next, with these questions, let us return to the battlefield of network mutual assistance to see this decade of change.
Part One: Ten Years of Mutual Aid, a Hurricane Advance Movement Supported by Internet Giants and Capital
In China, "difficult and expensive medical treatment" has always been an unavoidable social problem. The emergence of network mutual assistance is to allow people to share risks through the Internet when facing major diseases.
This model first appeared in 2011 in China. At that time, Mr. Martin Zhang, who worked in Taiping Life Insurance and Guotai Junan Securities successively, founded the Anti-Cancer Commune (later renamed "Kangai Commune") to solve the problem of medical expenses for patients with cancer. In the commune, to combat the risk of cancer, tens of thousands of participants agreed to each other that if anyone suffers from cancer, others will donate money to help cancer patients raise funds, generally hundreds of thousands of yuan, and the cost will be shared equally. It is very low, which greatly relieves the financial pressure of cancer patients, while those who do not suffer from cancer get peace of mind.
It can be seen that network mutual assistance forms a pool of risk contracts through payment by everyone and then uses an evenly shared method to protect people in medical treatment, accidents, or other difficulties. This is very similar to traditional insurance, except that it relies on the mobile Internet, so it has low entry barriers for users (pre-charges as low as a few yuan), low intermediate costs (without the high operating costs of insurance companies), and self-propagation (traditional insurance) It needs marketing) and other characteristics, and has a certain degree of innovation in the model.
In 2014, Kangai Commune established a company, and the network mutual aid project entered the actual operation stage. At the same time, Yu Liang, who was born in the media, smelled a business opportunity in the "crowdfunding" business that was in the great fire at that time. He joined 5 technicians to start a business in a hutong room on the second ring road in Northeast Beijing. Soon after, a project called "Easy Chip" emerged from this team.
At this moment, the east wind of the policy blew.
In 2014, the State Council issued a document to encourage the acceleration of the development of the insurance industry, which clearly stated: “encourage the development of various forms of mutual assistance and cooperative insurance”. In early 2015, the China Insurance Regulatory Commission promulgated the "Trial Measures for the Supervision of Mutual Insurance Organizations", hoping to expand the coverage of social insurance through mutual insurance and at the same time enrich the market organization of the domestic insurance industry.
Entrepreneurs and capitalists who saw the opportunity began to extend their tentacles into this field.
According to incomplete statistics, there were close to 200 online mutual assistance platforms at the peak of 2016, and many newly established companies received financing ranging from millions to tens of millions of yuan. What's interesting is that because there are so many participants, various animals and plants have appeared in the name.
Inventory of online mutual assistance platforms that have received financing (data source: Tianyancha)
It was also this year that Shen Peng, the No. 10 employees of Meituan, resigned from Meituan Dianping and founded Waterdrop Company. As the first business launched by the company, the official introduction of Waterdrop Mutual Help shows that it is positioned as a network mutual help community, providing members with low-threshold and cost-effective pre-risk prevention services. All members join the community following the platform rules and help each other. , To fight against the risks of cancer and accidents together.
With high-quality operational capabilities and product capabilities, Waterdrop has rapidly developed in China’s third-, fourth-, and fifth-tier cities and township markets. During the capital winter in the first half of 2019, it became an industry with continuous financing of more than 1.6 billion yuan. The focus of attention. In this process, the mutual assistance business is also growing rapidly. As of November 2020, Waterdrop Mutual Aid has assisted more than 16,000 families and allocated more than 1.75 billion yuan in mutual aid funds.
The good traffic performance and high-quality insurance scenarios presented by the network mutual assistance have made Internet giants unable to sit still.
In 2018, Ant Group and Xinmei entered through group insurance and launched the product "mutual insurance" (later renamed "mutual treasure"), which attracted 20 million users in one and a half months and quickly became the largest online mutual assistance platform in China. Subsequently, Internet companies such as JD, Didi, Suning, Meituan, Sina, Baidu, 360, and Xiaomi followed suit. Suddenly, online mutual assistance has become a battlefield where giants compete to fight each other.
The reason behind this is that, based on the characteristics of low threshold and inclusiveness, network mutual assistance can provide insurance drainage for giants and reach the sinking market.
After fierce competition, the market competition pattern of network mutual assistance began to take shape. Among them, the "Big Three" at the head are Mutual Bao under the Ant Group, Water Mutual under Water Drop, and Easy Mutual under Easy Chip. The share of the former has exceeded 100 million people, and the latter two have tens of millions.
In the second echelon, Meituan, Baidu, Didi, Suning, 360, Gecko Mutual Assistance, e Mutual Assistance, Kangai Commune, Quark Alliance, Zhongtuo Gang, etc. The number of participants is between hundreds of thousands and tens of millions. . The network mutual assistance project is the best for the time being.
However, behind Cyclonus’s advance, the problems of the network mutual assistance platform are constantly exposed.
Part II: The network mutual aid platform queues up and "shuts down", has the industry's result now?
The time came to August 7, 2020, and Baidu's Lanhuo Mutual Aid Program announced its closure after only 300 days of operation.
According to an announcement issued by Baidu, the reason why the Lanhuo Mutual Aid Program was hurriedly offline was that the number of participating members was less than 500,000. Therefore, to protect the rights and interests of users, the Lanhuo Mutual Aid Program had to be suspended.
Judging from the situation facing the industry, this is not Baidu's excuse. It should be understood that despite the low operating costs and user joining costs of the network mutual assistance platform, the incidence of members will gradually rise over time, and the sharing fee is bound to rise. This will result in a difference between the user's expected and actual apportionment levels, which will lead to apportionment customer loss. The loss of customers will cause the cost of other members to continue to rise, causing a vicious circle.
Taking Xiang Hubao as an example, the platform’s critical illness mutual aid plan shows that the average per capita apportionment amount for the first phase of August 2019 was 1.47 yuan, and the first phase of October 2019 rose to 3.01 yuan, while the average per capita amount for the first phase of January 2021 The share has risen to 5.28 yuan.
In December of last year, the number of people sharing the share of Xiang Hubao experienced a significant month-on-month decline of nearly 2% for the first time.
Therefore, over time, the increase in per capita apportionment and the decline in apportionment numbers are both problems that network mutual assistance has to face.
Not only that, but there are also problems such as exaggerated propaganda and opaque information on online mutual assistance platforms. On the market, the network mutual assistance plans of some platforms are in a gray area, and there are problems such as exaggerated publicity and selective disclosure of information. For example, there are no prompts about doubts and complaints on the publicity page of the official website.
This is related to the role played by the network mutual assistance platform. In the operation of the network mutual assistance business, the platform only assumes the responsibility of operation and management and does not cover the risks. Therefore, in the actual process of customer acquisition and compensation, the network mutual assistance platform has no intention or motivation to conduct strict screening of users' health conditions. On the contrary, there may be a tendency to loosen entry and exit due to the management fee being linked to the total apportionment and the consideration of customer acquisition costs. If things go on like this, it will inevitably lead to serious moral hazards and adverse selection problems.
Besides, the operating risks of mutual assistance platforms have also been questioned. According to Caixin reports, most of the network mutual assistance platforms currently operate on the edge of profit or loss. Generally speaking, the management cost of network mutual assistance is 8% of the apportioned amount in each period. These funds are used to pay for case investigation, review, and management of mutual assistance fund revenue and expenditure. However, it is difficult for many platforms to make a turnaround by relying on the share of the single cost unless it is superimposed on the follow-up commercial insurance, health management services, and other items. These businesses are quickly built by the head platform.
Besides, the biggest problem is that the power flow effect of network mutual assistance has made it a rapidly growing capital pool and has a huge amount of user information. These are all related to the public interest.
Don't forget that P2P, which gathers a large number of funds and users, is a lesson of the past, and it has brought a very negative impact on society after the "explosion".
It is for the above reasons that the signal from the supervisory level is becoming clearer and clearer.
At the beginning of this year, after Meituan Mutual Aid was shut down, Xiao Yuanqi, Chief Risk Officer and Spokesperson of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission said at a press conference of the State Council Information Office, “We feel that Meituan Mutual Aid has deviated from the main business of Meituan. The increasing selection risk is the main reason for its closure. In the next step, we will pay more attention to the mutual assistance business of network companies, understand their operation methods and risk conditions, and then take corresponding measures according to the situation."
Facing the severe situation, many platforms have already tried to formalize the mutual assistance business. People familiar with the matter told Arterial.com that Water Drop Company wanted to obtain an Internet insurance company license regardless of whether it was investing in Anxin Property Insurance or communicating with regulators many times. However, the progress was not smooth.
Therefore, immediately following the easy mutual assistance of Easy Chip, Water Drop also announced that Water Drop Mutual Assistance was closed. The two are currently rumored to be planning an IPO, and abandoning the mutual assistance business is also to prevent their existing compliance problems from becoming a "stumbling block" to the company's listing.
Taking the prospectus issued by Ant Group in October last year as an example, the listing risk column clearly stated, “If Huhubao fails to meet compliance requirements due to various reasons and is not suitable for Ant Group to continue to operate as a listed company, Ant Group will Spin off the mutual treasure business".
In other words, once Ant Group launches its listing plan again this year, the mutual treasure business is likely to be divested or shut down. Once this happens, the last of the "Big Three" may no longer exist.
Of course, it is still too early to say the final game. This needs to continue to observe the follow-up actions of the existing network mutual assistance programs such as Hu Hubao, Suning Ning Hubao, Didi Didi Mutual, 360 Mutual Assistance, Zhongtopia, and Quark Alliance.
But one thing is certain is that under the trend of stricter national regulatory policies, the turning point of the network mutual assistance industry has come.
Part III: The next stop for network mutual assistance
In the announcement issued by Water Drop Mutual Assistance yesterday, it was mentioned that “to provide users with more comprehensive and stable protection, the service model will be upgraded, that is, to provide users with health protection services.” Among them, Water Drop Mutual Assistance provides members with a guaranteed period of One-year water drop health insurance, the premium is borne by the platform, and it promises to provide members with free online consultation, physical examination, and other health services.
As early as in a previous speech, Shen Peng, founder and CEO of Waterdrop, said, “Most of the members of Waterdrop Mutual Aid are in China's third, fourth, and fifth-tier cities." These users can realize that the amount of social security coverage is limited, but Limited by economic conditions, relatively high-priced commercial health insurance is not attractive enough for them. Therefore, network mutual assistance programs such as Water Drop Mutual Assistance act as a supplementary product between social insurance and commercial health insurance to protect this group of people.
In other words, the inclusive product of network mutual assistance is mainly responsible for covering more people and cultivating users' habits of using other protection products besides social security. The commercial health insurance behind it is the "cake" that these platforms want to win.
Relevant data shows that the original premium income of my country's health insurance in 2020 has exceeded 800 billion yuan, and it is estimated that the scale of health insurance premiums in 2022 will exceed 100 billion yuan for the first time, and it is expected to reach 2021 billion yuan in 2025. The market has great potential for development.
Also, from the perspective of market competition, network mutual assistance has faced its rival in the past two years-Huiminbao. It is a supplementary medical insurance system for major diseases established based on social medical insurance with "government-led, commercial insurance underwriting, voluntary insurance, and multi-channel financing".
Different from the lack of supervision of network mutual assistance, Huiminbao is a formal insurance product, which is better at risk, stability, and government endorsement. Besides, when insurance companies bid for the government's Huiminbao project, their profitability is strictly restricted, so they have a price advantage, which makes Huiminbao go crazy and expand the city since last year. As of February this year, Huimin Insurance has covered nearly 200 cities across the country, with more than 25 million people participating, and total premiums exceeding 1 billion yuan.
Similar to the role of network mutual assistance, Huiminbao also exists as a bridge between basic medical insurance and commercial health insurance and has a certain substitution effect between each other. Therefore, based on the aforementioned advantages, major Internet insurance platforms have increased their efforts to benefit people's insurance, and the status of network mutual assistance in the market has declined.
From this perspective, the historical role of network mutual assistance has been played, and similar products have appeared on the market. Therefore, whether network mutual assistance will be iteratively upgraded under the new regulatory policies or replaced by other inclusive insurance, has been engraved in the development of my country's health insurance industry.
Next, the industry needs to think about how to use more and better products to help the construction of my country's multi-level medical security system.
Finally, what kind of mentality should we use to face an industry that has brought value to people suffering from serious illness, but is now far from the wind?
Although there are regrets, they are full of respect.
Comments
Post a Comment