As retail customer behaviour evolves rapidly and corporate digital transformation deepens, banks increasingly employ artificial intelligence (AI) to reshape retail and corporate services, enhancing customer experience and improving operational efficiency. As a leader in fintech innovation, Ping An Bank (PAB) has embraced technological change and embedded AI deeply across its business processes to support innovation. In 2024, the bank achieved notable breakthroughs in AI applications, wealth management and corporate services, establishing itself as a representative institution of high-quality, AI-enabled transformation in China’s banking industry. PAB develops a balanced and future-proof AI solutions framework Amid the accelerating adoption of generative AI (GenAI) across enterprises, PAB has established three large-scale AI application platforms — the ‘YouTu Wanxiang’ platform (YouTu platform), the remote service platform, and the intelligent voice-calling system — creating an intelligent matrix that encompasses marketing, service, operations and management. This architecture positions PAB among the industry leaders in AI application maturity. At the same time, the bank is building a next-generation intelligent middle platform and agent ecosystem through its ‘Super Coach’ knowledge hub and ‘Agent Foundry’ platform, thereby laying a robust foundation for its AI strategy in the years ahead. AI-generated content enhances marketing and digital operations The YouTu platform is an end-to-end intelligent creative marketing platform serving the entire bank. Now in its third iteration, the platform supports the complete lifecycle from requirement submission, content generation and intelligent review to automated deployment, performance tracking and iterative optimisation, thereby creating a closed loop of “platform + tools + content + standards”. Its key functions include personalised multi-format generation (image and copy tailored to users or segments), embedded AI authoring assistants, a low-barrier self-service editor, automated compliance checks and one-click publishing to new media channels. Together, these capabilities enhance marketing efficiency while ensuring regulatory and brand compliance. To date, the platform has been adopted by 238 head office and branch departments and over 6,000 business users. Cumulative AI-generated images exceed 33 million, supported by more than 2,100 self-service creators. The platform has delivered cost savings of over RMB 100 million ($14 million) year-on-year. Intelligent image generation has accelerated production efficiency fivefold, while the self-service image creation rate has risen from 10% in early 2023 to 96.5% in 2024. The YouTu platform has become a major driver of retail growth for PAB and a benchmark for intelligent marketing in the banking sector. Human–AI collaboration at scale PAB has also developed a remote service platform that embeds AI deeply for human–machine collaboration. Serving around five million non-wealth retail customers, the platform provides comprehensive digital financial services across “spend, use and earn” scenarios. The AI assistant automatically generates daily contact lists and task priorities for agents, offers script suggestions, predicts call answer likelihoods and provides instant messaging reply templates, thereby reducing customer response times to within 30 minutes. Through AI summarisation and semantic slicing of conversations, the platform structures and tags call records for quality control and management. In 2024, the average service coverage per agent exceeded 4,800 customers, nearly ten times that of traditional offline relationship managers, positioning the platform as a domestic leader in AI-driven remote retail banking. Warm, frequent engagement with long-tail customers To improve high-frequency engagement with long-tail customers, PAB has developed a voice outbound platform underpinned by in-house automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language understanding (NLU) and text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities. The system, which supports multiple languages, voice timbres and interaction scenarios, is applied to product maturity reminders, loan updates, birthday greetings and other operational touchpoints. By end-2024, the platform had served 26 million customers; more than 70% of interactions exceeded ten seconds and average call length duration rose by 16%. The platform integrates video calling, digital-human voice interaction and robotic process automation (RPA)-enabled process completion, fulfilling the role of an “AI secretary”. This strengthens automation, emotional engagement and personalised service, thereby enhancing service quality for mass-market clients and supporting financial inclusion. Looking ahead, PAB is developing an intelligent production system for organisation, staff and processes through the Super Coach and Agent Foundry platforms. The Super Coach has been deployed across 67 operational scenarios (operations, risk control, FX, etc.) as an embedded plugin providing intelligent knowledge queries, document generation, process forecasting and real-time risk alerts. This improves internal efficiency and employee experience. The Agent Foundry uses low-code orchestration and a scheduling engine to generate intelligent workflow agents for approval, audit and credit scenarios. At present, 70% of pilot scenarios use AI assistance and 20% of core workflows have been AI-automated, advancing the application of AI across the bank’s principal processes. Redefining retail customer value: from scenarios to rewards Adhering to a customer-centric retail strategy, PAB has reshaped its products, services and experiences. In 2024 the bank focused on three areas — enhanced wealth advisory, an upgraded loyalty points system and automotive finance — to establish an end-to-end customer engagement model that increases retention and monetisation. Under its “good assets + good advisers” approach, Ping An has strengthened a unified online–offline advisory capability that combines intelligent and human collaboration. In 2024, the average number of monthly advisory touchpoints rose to 2.8 per client, while overall coverage grew by 23% year-on-year. Through scenario-based financial services, portfolio health evaluators and behavioural insight engines, advisory services have extended to mass and younger segments, marking the shift from product sales to sustained service. In cards, the bank’s “four-pillar” points of modernisation — elementisation, tool-isation, platformisation and scenarisation — created a redeemable points ecosystem. This includes “points as cash” at checkout through partnerships with Alipay, Meituan and JD.com, reaching millions and materially increasing spend per account. In auto finance, Ping An’s vehicle finance centre provides fully online, automated consumer loans for new energy vehicles (NEVs), aligned with direct-sales manufacturer models. Ninety percent of customers receive automated approval, with the fastest end-to-end funding completed within ten minutes. In 2023, Ping An’s NEV loans exceeded RMB 32 billion ($4.48 billion), serving nearly 180,000 customers and partnering with nine of the top ten emerging domestic NEV brands. PAB streamlines payments across industrial chains Enterprises across industrial chains seek financial and payment support through more digital, stable and sustainable means. In response, Ping An implements a two-pronged strategy: trade & supply-chain finance as the strategic core, complemented by enterprise services that extend across payments and acquiring scenarios. Using a “1 + N + n” model (core enterprise + leading partners + extensive SMEs), the bank provides full-chain digital financing. For automotive, manufacturing and new energy sectors, Ping An provides rapid discounting, order financing and other tailored instruments; its IoT-enabled digital loans reduce approval times from weeks to a single day. In 2024, the bank’s digitised order-financing coverage reached 98%. The bank served 7,093 automotive dealers (around 20% of the national market) and disbursed RMB 421.5 billion ($59 billion) in supply-chain lending. The Ping An Hao Lian blockchain platform secures tamper-proof transaction records and supports green-chain initiatives with partners such as BYD and government agencies. These capabilities advance inclusion for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and green transition financing. In 2024, Ping An was recognised by The Asian Banker as Best Trade and Supply Chain Finance Bank in China. In enterprise services, the bank’s brand-chain acquiring solution provides an integrated, multi-entity and multi-channel collection framework, combining point of sale (POS), quick response (QR), mini-programme and platform receipts with centralised fund pooling, real-time accounting and intelligent risk control. Built on in-house cloud-native technologies, the solution signed nearly 200 customers in its first year and processed more than RMB 3 billion ($420 million) across 10 million transactions. It was recognised as Best Acquiring Solution in China. The ‘YiQiPay’ enterprise mobile payment product integrates account management, mobile payment, scenario-based consumption and granular expense control, creating the industry’s first full-process enterprise mobile payment ecosystem. Employers can issue digital credentials to employees and business-to-business (B2B) users, with the system enforcing role-based limits, real-time reconciliation and automated expense reporting. In its first year, ‘YiQiPay’ achieved RMB 3 billion ($420 million) in transaction volume and nearly tenfold client growth, strengthening Ping An’s position in corporate payments. It was recognised by The Asian Banker as Best Payment Project in China. Owing to its performance across retail, transaction and technology domains, PAB also multiple awards in 2025 from The Asian Banker, including Best AI/Gen AI Application in Retail Marketing Initiative in Asia Pacific, Best Trade and Supply Chain Finance Bank in China and Best Financial Advisory Service in China, among others. Contact details: Ping An Bank https://bank.pingan.com
