As a rare surname, “Light” can be traced back to the Warring States Period more than 2,000 years ago.
At that time, there was a chivalrous man in the state of Yan, named Tian Guang, who played a key role in the famous assassination of Qin by Jing Ke. After introducing Jing Ke to Prince Dan, Tian Guang chose to sacrifice himself in order to keep the secret. Later, when Qin destroyed the six kingdoms, in order to avoid disaster, Tian Guang’s clansmen dispersed into several branches and went to other places, hiding their names, and began to take “Guang” as their surname.
In historical records, Tian Guang lived in the countryside all his life, made extensive friends, and was quite romantic with the heroic heroes of Yan and Zhao. And this legacy of the ancestors has also continued, affecting the descendants.
Since childhood, Guangyao often listened to the elders of the clan holding thick genealogies and telling stories of the past scattered over the long years. Under the influence of my ears and eyes, that kind of life attitude of being romantic and uninhibited, being good friends, constantly exploring, and daring to think and do, gradually became the background for Guangyao to study, work, and later set up a small umbrella insurance brokerage platform.
A science student who got the highest social score in the whole grade
The 1980s and 1990s was a time full of changes, opportunities, rapid changes and restlessness. Guangyao was born and grew up in such a social atmosphere.
In middle school, from time to time in the science class, he was caught by teachers peeking at literary works. “Cultural Journey”, “A Sigh in a Thousand Years”, “Ordinary World”, these books that carry the infinite curiosity and desire to explore the world and life, have been read by him many times.
Later, he met a special geography teacher. Like many enthusiastic young people in that era, this teacher went to Shenzhen after graduation, and returned to his hometown to teach after several hardships.
In the teacher’s description, Guangyao and his classmates heard about Bill Gates for the first time and understood what a business is and what an entrepreneur is. “Doing business is a good thing”, “Entrepreneurs can make their own and others’ lives better”, these initial cognitions subtly planted a fire in Guangyao’s heart: to be curious, to explore freely business world.
In 2003, Guangyao was admitted to Wuhan University of Technology. Although he was a science student in high school, he felt that communication, machinery, and automation were “too boring”, and he wanted to study “romantic” business, so he chose economics.
In fact, this choice is “unexpected and reasonable”.
In the impressions of many of his peers, Guangyao liked to “mix” since he was a child. He was able to show off and would show off, and was keen to “flicker” everyone together to engage in group activities, which was quite different from the serious and dull image of a science student.
In the following four years of university life, Guangyao became more like a duck to water, got rid of the shackles of test-oriented education, and was able to explore and accumulate more independently and freely. He also met a large number of various friends, and felt that “the whole person has opened up”. .
His literary genes also continued to grow. First, he helped the student affairs department of the school to set up the “Xue Gong Newsletter” magazine, and then set up the “Xue Gong Square” website to hold meetings, interviews, take photos, write manuscripts, compile and distribute freshman handbooks, print and distribute campus maps and shop guidelines… I am very busy. almost. In the process of building a website, Guangyao found that he was lacking in computer, so he went to major in computer science again.
In this way, during college, Guangyao and his companions were active all over the campus. At that time, there were as many as twenty-four or five colleges in the school, and Guangyao “mixed” so that there were familiar teachers and students in each college, and the social score of each semester was basically the highest of all grades.
“The whole environment makes people feel that the world is vast and can do a lot.” In Guangyao’s memory, the social atmosphere at that time was high-spirited, the rapid changes were blooming everywhere, the Internet was changing at an astonishing speed, and the tide of the times was coming.
Twice redirection: from Kingdee to Tencent, from e-commerce to insurance
After graduating in 2007, Guangyao joined Kingdee to make Youshang.com, an online accounting SaaS software that is still widely used. After a period of time, he found that compared with the fast To C Internet, the overall pace of the domestic To B industry was still too slow. So two years later, in 2009, Guangyao chose to jump to Tencent and move to the Internet.
Looking back now, the understanding and choice at that time fit the general trend of the times and the inevitability of the industry behind it.
Unlike the European and American enterprise service markets that have matured for decades, China’s SaaS infrastructure was still very weak at that time, and the maturity of the To B market has not yet been cultivated. On the other hand, the To C Internet, with its rapid trend, has quickly become the logical base of China’s commercial production relations, and therefore has promoted the Chinese enterprise service industry to embark on a path with a strong To C color that is very different from Europe and the United States. APPs such as Weifeishu are the B2C2B development path of super entry.
From 2009 to 2014, for five or six years, Guangyao worked as a product manager, starting with QQ value-added service projects, and then transferred to the e-commerce department, participating in QQ Mall, QQ Online Shopping, Yixun, Paipai.com And other retail e-commerce projects, I have experienced a series of explorations of Tencent e-commerce in the past.
These two similar but different projects made Guangyao realize that the essence of retail e-commerce is ultimately retail, not the Internet. To a certain extent, Tencent is relatively good at e-commerce of virtual products such as QQ members, rather than e-commerce of physical products that require procurement, sales and warehouse distribution. This experience and knowledge had a profound impact on his later cross-border entry into the insurance industry and the establishment of an online insurance intermediary platform.
In Guangyao’s memory, the Tencent e-commerce team has a collaborative atmosphere of free speech and efficient communication. “Tencent is a company that allows you to play freely. You don’t have to blindly obey. If you understand one thing well enough, you can use your own logic to persuade the leadership.”
A story that kept him fresh in his mind was that, for a while, the primary entrance of Tencent’s e-commerce business was located on the QQ panel on the PC side. At the entrance, in order to grab resources, each application team planned to arrange the display order of each application according to the click volume from high to low. But Guangyao sees it differently.
He feedback to the top that the e-commerce portal and application ranking are not an advertising space, but more like a navigation road sign. Taking the traffic signs as an example, the traffic department will not move the B road signs to the A intersection because the traffic at intersection A is low and the traffic at intersection B is high, because the road signs are used for navigation and have their own internal logic. After some debate, Guangyao’s suggestion was adopted.
In fact, Internet companies do cross-border Internet + physical business. Out of confidence in past successful experiences, there is often an inertia of copying and pasting Internet thinking and playing methods to other industries, but this inertia often hides great risks.
The reason is that each industry has its own internal laws. If the Internet +, technology + entity industry wants to succeed, it still needs to be based on recognizing the essence of the entity industry and respecting the laws of the industry, rather than playing with traffic. Blind belief and pursuit. This requires that Internet entrepreneurial teams and companies can continue to innovate themselves when exploring across borders.
Later, with the deepening of the understanding of e-commerce business, Guangyao developed a course “E-commerce Industry Chain”, which polished his own experience and cognition into finished products, shared and exported them to the outside world. As a course lecturer at Tencent Academy, he often travels to Beijing, Chengdu, Shanghai and other parts of the country to give lectures and exchanges.
At that time, Tencent already had a wide variety of study clubs, and everyone gathered together regularly to share and discuss topics. In the process, Guangyao’s understanding of Internet + and technology + became more profound and comprehensive.
In 2014, the upsurge of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” swept the Chinese Internet industry. Meituan, Didi, and Bytes rose rapidly, and Guangyao was about to enter his thirties. Years of input and precipitation gave him the opportunity to grow up. The urge to “want to go out and make gestures”.
It happened that his child was about to be born at that time, but he could not find a child insurance that suits his actual needs on the market. Considering that insurance products would not have the burden of purchasing and selling warehouses, Guangyao decided to make one by himself. A lightweight intermediary platform that sells more refined insurance products in the form of Internet e-commerce.
After I made up my mind, I did what I said, looking for investment and building a team. In just two months after coming out of Tencent, the small umbrella insurance brokerage company founded by Guangyao was established.
It is worth mentioning that most of the founding members of the team have experience in Tencent QQ, Tencent retail e-commerce, etc., and are partners of Guangyao who worked together before. With the successful experience of QQ value-added business and the exploration and attempt of Tencent’s e-commerce, entering the insurance brokerage industry, what different new thinking can be brought, which has become the common expectation of the team and the market.
Insurance e-commerce platform, the focus is not on e-commerce
In fact, 2014 and 2015 also coincided with the bright years of Internet insurance technology entrepreneurship. A large number of practitioners from the Internet and technology companies are aiming at various chronic diseases in the traditional insurance industry with the trend of innovation and exploration, hoping to use the Internet model, play style, and technology to change the previous extensive management of the industry.
In Guangyao’s view, the key to insurance is planning ahead. The mission of entrepreneurs is to promote the progress of the insurance industry through continuous, even a small improvement every day, and prepare an umbrella for users before the storm comes.
Internet insurance brokerage platforms can be roughly divided into two models, one is a “platform type” based on scale advantages and uses technology to optimize matching efficiency, and the other is an accurate matching type based on vertical groups and scenarios.
Deeply aware of the pain points of the homogenization and extensiveness of insurance products on the market, Guangyao chose to start from the latter, starting with short-term health insurance, hoping to optimize the insurance supply with some of its own efforts.
The first product is an accident insurance for the elderly. Previously, there were strict restrictions on the age of insurance for the elderly in the market. Older people were prone to falls. Insurance companies were often reluctant to sell such products, and many elderly people could not buy them even if they wanted to. Behind the long-term unsolvable pain points, there is a deep and urgent need, and it is also the value creation that Guangyao values. In June 2015, Small Umbrella launched its first customized product “Small Umbrella Insurance Parental Accident Insurance”, expanding the coverage of the elderly to 85 years old.
After that, starting in 2017, Little Umbrella gradually cooperated with colleges and universities and medical testing institutions to develop Optimus Prime Term Life Insurance, Hornet Children’s Critical Illness, Super Life Insurance, etc. Mary and other series of customized long-term insurance, and released the intelligent insurance consultant “Jingjing”, intelligent underwriting “Xiaozhi”, etc., to open the big data era of insurance technology.
By 2020, Little Umbrella will try to provide online and offline integrated services. Through offline clinics, marketing and business development, etc., on the one hand, it will get rid of the homogeneity of claims settlement, and at the same time, it will also complete the closed service loop, so that online insurance can return to the essence of “service industry” . And this cognition is especially important for practitioners who bring their own Internet genes and technology genes.
“Insurance itself has a strong service industry attribute, and users need to feel the existence of insurance through services.” In Guangyao’s view, just as the essence of retail e-commerce is not business activities running on the Internet or computers, but still retail Similarly, the essence of Internet insurance is not the Internet, but risk management and financial services.
Just because its transaction link is in electronic form, it should not be assumed that its service link must also be purely online. On the contrary, insurance itself contains a heavy service component, and the insurance intermediary platform is not only a purchasing platform, but also a service platform. Technology or the Internet is only used to improve the efficiency of the original service, and play a role in supplementing rather than replacing the original service.
What’s more, the current Internet insurance has passed the initial dividend period and entered the second half that requires high-quality development. The core point of each competition has changed from the original sales as the center to the customer and service center, from the original grabbing market share and insurance premium scale, to protecting the interests of customers and providing accurate services as the center.
These two major trends are not only necessary for the Internet insurance intermediary platform to increase its own multi-layered moat, but also the endogenous nature and meaning of insurance. Especially in the “service”, the industry has returned to the original intention of “insurance and insurance”.
Industry law is a word frequently mentioned by Guangyao in this exchange. In his view, foreign factors such as the Internet and technology have entered the insurance industry with a long history of hundreds of years. Although they can bring some new experience and new thinking, they all need to be built on the basis of respecting the original rules of the industry. to optimize and adjust. “Not only can you not change the original nature of the insurance industry, but you have to learn from it carefully. Only after in-depth study can you grasp the real contradictions and achieve real improvement.”
The domestic insurance industry has long been in a state of pulling between users, insurance companies, and regulators: users often feel that the pricing of an insurance product is expensive, but from the perspective of financial system risks, the most worrying thing about insurance products is that the price of insurance products is too low , resulting in insufficient solvency of insurance companies, and thus the risk of bankruptcy.
If insurance companies have insufficient risk management and pricing power, they will inevitably fall into the pull of the two parties. The reason for this “tear” lies in the limitations of risk management. To break through, you need a weapon, and technology is a priority.
The more data accumulated, the deeper the insurance company’s understanding of risks, the stronger the ability to control risks, and the more accurate the pricing can be. At this time, users will feel that it is cost-effective, insurance companies can also afford to pay, and the overall risk of the industry will be reduced.
In fact, before the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020, the domestic insurance industry has been in a relatively extensive development for a long time. A large number of insurance products on the market do not match the actual needs of users. Nevertheless, insurance companies based on the general environment of the industry have developed well, and this has caused some problems to be covered up for a long time. It was not until the past two years. Under the pressure of the big environment, it was gradually exposed.
The current insurance industry is undoubtedly going through a cold winter period. On the one hand, the repeated outbreak of the epidemic has suppressed the consumer demand for insurance products to a certain extent. The return on assets has deteriorated, and it is also difficult to find some high-net-worth investment targets.
But in Guangyao’s view, the cold winter is only temporary. The integration of the Internet, technology, and the insurance industry is still an irreversible trend. The current dullness is the best time for the industry to gather strength and integrate, and then transform and transform.
Guangyao once used “the process of life to explore” to review the choices and experiences along the way. In fact, the development of an industry is also the same. It is necessary to find out the way forward in the constant conflict between the left and the right. The practitioners in it must be able to face the pain points of the market, do the hard things, and climb the steep peaks. Only in this way can a deeper level of value be created. Leifeng Network Leifeng Network Leifeng Network
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