Hot on the heels of its Life Insurance Company of the Year award at this year’s Asia Insurance Industry Awards, Nan Shan Life’s Mr Yin Chung Yao spoke to Asia Insurance Review about how the company achieved its success over the years and what its future looks like.
In recent years, global pandemics, geopolitical tensions and inflation have intensified the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity environment.
Taiwan, situated on a seismic belt, frequently faces natural and man-made disasters. As the world confronts challenges like societal change, climate issues and pandemics, the insurance industry must evolve to enhance agility and serve as a resilient backbone.
“Nan Shan Life established an emergency response SOP for major incidents, leveraging its vast network of partner hospitals, over 30,000 agents and employees across Taiwan,” said Nan Shan Life chairman Yin Chung Yao.
“This enables rapid actions in the wake of accidents or natural disasters, delivering aid and resources to both policyholders and non-policyholders. This effort underscores the critical role of the insurance industry in forming a robust social safety net.”
The life insurer is also keeping a close eye on how its customer base is changing, and the new demands that have been arising post-COVID.
“With over 60 years of experience in Taiwan, Nan Shan has served more than a quarter of households nationwide. As a result, we must think ahead for the benefit of over 6m policyholders,” he said.
Responding to ageing demographics and declining birth rates, Nan Shan Life implements two strategies: ‘Service empowerment’ and ‘digital empowerment’. “These initiatives align with the company’s commitment to sustainability – Nan Shan as the source of excellent insurance and the backer of good health – and aims to solidify Taiwan’s health capital,” he said.
Implementation of AI tools
One of the major factors in its win during the awards this year was the remarkable results it achieved in implementing AI tools. By establishing the ‘Beyond Lab’ digital team, the company has facilitated cross-departmental collaboration to evaluate business processes and identify leverage points.
Using the concept of application modules (archetypes), the team has developed various AI-powered plug-in modules. These modules, integrated into an intelligent plug-in platform architecture, can seamlessly embed into existing business workflows to enhance process efficiency.
“Moreover, through AI pre-built engineering, these application modules can combine knowledge bases from different domains, replicate, and expand across various application scenarios, thereby rapidly amplifying business value,” said Mr Yin.
“Take the AI Compliance Assistant we developed as an example to address the issues faced by compliance personnel when interpreting and consolidating penalty documents. Generative AI was applied to generate filtering commands automatically, interpret penalty content and compile summary reports. This significantly improved operational efficiency and report quality,” he said.
To prevent hallucinations in generative AI outputs, the development team adopted a retrieval-augmented generation framework. This approach combined semantic search with large language models, ensuring that the responses generated by the AI assistant are more accurate and contextually appropriate. It also provided timely and effective decision-making support in the face of rapidly changing regulatory requirements.
The insurer also implemented its AI claims recognition service, which enhances claims accuracy and saves processing time. It has been adopted across both life and non-life insurance sectors, benefiting more Taiwanese users. Nan Shan Life also pioneered the use of Fast-ID technology in mobile insurance applications, enabling quick and secure processes without physical ID documents, reducing fraud risks and improving user privacy.
Marching forward
Nan Shan Life is the largest non-financial-holding life insurance company in Taiwan, and the company intends to take advantage of its market position.
“Over time, we have accumulated invaluable experience, enabling us to foresee risks and transform them into opportunities. This gives us the confidence and capability to protect our customers by offering more diverse coverage,” said Mr Yin.
He spoke of three major strategies:
Safeguard customers’ health and wealth, preparing for the future
- Proactive health engagement: Insurance is not just about claims after illnesses occur. We aim to proactively connect with ‘health’ by taking the initiative to protect the well-being of our policyholders, becoming a backer of national health.
- Promoting health awareness: At the end of 2024, we sponsored a large-scale city marathon for the first time, encouraging participants to invest in their ‘health account’ through running. This initiative promotes daily healthy habits to help individuals maintain their health and longevity while building a healthier Taiwan.
- Support for diverse sports events: We have sponsored events such as the Chen Chang Ming Award, supporting Taiwan’s long-distance runners. By sponsoring sports in rural elementary schools, we are laying the groundwork for students’ physical education and embodying our cultural value of fostering health.
Innovate with digital services, enhancing customer engagement
- Transforming service centres: To ensure fair treatment and inclusive financial access, we are upgrading Nan Shan’s customer service centres nationwide. Service desks now provide ‘important policyholder rights’ explanations in eight languages via QR codes with both text and audio options. We are also introducing measures tailored to elderly and new immigrants, with regular training sessions for staff to stay updated on the latest trends.
- Enhancing operational efficiency: By integrating and optimising digital tools, we allow agents to focus on high-value sales and services, fostering trust with clients. Additionally, digital tools continuously accumulate data for feedback, enabling more precise future services and identifying new business opportunities.
- Expanding health services: Leveraging our market advantage in spillover-effect products: We integrate these with differentiated value-added services, such as our ‘Health Guardian Circle’, focusing on long-term care and critical illnesses to meet national needs. This approach improves customers’ stickiness to the Nan Shan brand.
- Meeting unfulfilled needs: We continuously explore unmet demands, providing customised coverage for different life stages, financial planning and family structures. For example, our highly praised ‘MOMMY CARE Term Insurance’ supports women navigating late marriage and childbirth trends. Meanwhile, our diversified long-term care products empower individuals to choose their desired lifestyle in old age amid Taiwan’s aging and low-birth-rate trends.
Leading the industry in ESG and sustainable growth
- Actively engage in international sustainability efforts: For two consecutive years (2023 and 2024), we participated in the United Nations Climate Change Conference and were the only Taiwanese insurance company to attend the World Climate Summit. We delivered a keynote on ‘Climate Resilience and Health – Financing Strategies for a Healthier Future’, emphasising the role of financial products and services in risk mitigation and transfer.
- Caring for vulnerable communities: Since 2023, we have launched the ‘Care for Remote Indigenous Villages Programme’ project, collaborating with hospitals and NGOs to address healthcare accessibility challenges in remote areas. By focusing on chronic disease education, we aim to enhance health awareness and resilience in these communities amid climate change.
- Driving sustainable health leadership: Since the launch of the ‘Nan Shan Charity Foundation’s medical care programme’ in 2013, more than NT$530m in medical subsidy funds have been provided, assisting 45,000 economically disadvantaged families in emergency situations to overcome the difficulties of accessing medical treatment and mitigating the impact of climate change on human health.
A responsibility to sustainability
Nan Shan has also been a champion for sustainability for many years, with Mr Yin saying, “Insurance is deeply connected to people and the environment. Sustainability is our responsibility. By dedicating resources and expanding advocacy efforts, we aim to fulfil our role as a social safety net. A stable and prosperous society is the foundation for Nan Shan’s sustainability, and we firmly believe that humanity deserves a better future.” A