Ping An’s life insurance platform integration

Established in 1988, Ping An is a world-leading retail financial services group—it has 227 million retail customers and total assets of RMB10.1 trillion (US$1.5 trillion, 2021).

Its legacy technology includes a large number of front-end applications supported by hundreds of systems. Each application carried abundant business logic, resulting in less-than-optimal front-end applications and difficulties in system maintenance.

In the past, the business-oriented micro-services system could not provide clear business or application boundaries. This led to insufficient integration between micro-services and a lack of sharing between systems, which together prevented the development of the supportive climate required for innovation within the business. There was duplication in the positioning and functions of the insurer’s multiple platforms, which caused great confusion among users and impeded the unification of data.

In 2021, Ping An Life Insurance introduced the Domain-Driven Design (DDD) methodology into its construction channel to unify its enterprise architecture, reconstruct its business model and re-use its business service capabilities.

The design core of DDD is the domain model, meaning it is a representation of meaningful real-world concepts pertinent to the domain that need to be modeled in software. With the provision of business insights by Accenture, domain models are systematically abstracted and structured to directly reflect business knowledge.

By constructing the middle platform based on the domain model, the insurer aimed to better deal with business and customer needs, reduce manual operations and reduce dependency on the outdated

The solution introduced an enterprise architecture to segment the life insurance channel business:

• Horizontal sub-division: The channel’s middle-layer platform is horizontally sub-divided with three types for core domain functions that support the core capabilities of agents, the core processes for the entire insurance business and the supporting domain that underpins the core business.
• Multi-layer re-use: Aggregations, entities, value objects, domain events and services are designed and aggregated within the same domain boundary to provide shared capabilities.
• Unified tasks: The solution will enable the planning and creation of services for recruitment, training, performance, capacity, management and other scenarios.
• Efficient collaboration: Business and IT specialists are grouped for better collaboration under specific domains.