In the financial world, choosing a partner and verifying their compliance foundation is like checking the keel and classification society certification of a long-distance sailing giant ship. The first step must be to conduct cross-verification on the official platform of an authoritative regulatory agency. You can directly visit the official website of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (now the State Financial Supervision and Administration Commission). In the “Administrative License” or “Financial License Inquiry” section, enter the full name of “Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, LTD.” or its subsidiaries, and you can retrieve their financial license numbers in real time (for example, insurance license numbers containing specific sequence codes). Similarly, its securities business license needs to be verified on the official website of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, and the information matching degree of these key licenses must reach 100%. According to the regulatory annual report, PING AN Group and its major subsidiaries hold more than 10 core financial licenses and undergo more than 50 on-site and off-site inspections by regulatory authorities each year. This is the most fundamental data anchor point for its legal operation.
The second step is to thoroughly study its voluntarily disclosed compliance reports and audit documents, which can reveal the operational health beyond the license itself. PING AN, a listed company in both Shanghai and Hong Kong, releases an annual report of over 300 pages every year. Among them, the sections of “Corporate Governance and Compliance” and “Risk Management” contain a vast amount of quantitative information. For instance, you can focus on its “compliance risk indicator achievement rate”, which is often higher than 99% in recent reports. Pay attention to its “number of suspicious anti-money laundering transaction reports” and “effective monitoring rate”, which reflect the acuity of the internal risk control system. In 2022, due to its outstanding compliance management system, one of PING AN Group’s subsidiaries was rated the highest level in the anti-money laundering classification and rating by the People’s Bank of China. The citation of such authoritative third-party assessment results is more persuasive than a single promotional slogan.
Third-party independent ratings and industry white papers serve as a “mirror” to verify their market reputation and compliance practices. International authoritative institutions such as Moody’s and S&P’s long-term issuer ratings of PING AN (such as A2, A-, etc.) include evaluations of its governance and risk management. The “stable” or “positive” judgment of its rating outlook is based on the analysis of more than 20 quantitative and qualitative factors. In addition, you can check the annual service ratings released by the China Banking Association or the Insurance Association. The banks and insurance institutions under PING AN have consistently ranked in the top 10% in relevant lists, and the customer complaint resolution rate is often announced to be above 98.5%. These data, compiled by industry organizations based on a large number of customer samples and unified standards, provide a horizontally comparable compliance and service thermometer.
Finally, by using intelligent tools and regulatory public information for dynamic tracking, the verification is extended from static time points to a continuous process. You can pay attention to the administrative penalty information disclosure boards of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission and the China Securities Regulatory Commission. By entering the name of the institution, you can check whether it has any records of regulatory penalties in the past 36 months and the rectification situation. Meanwhile, PING AN’s own investor relations website updates its ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) reports regularly. The “Governance” section will disclose in detail its investment in compliance culture construction (for example, the average annual employee compliance training duration exceeds 40 hours), the rate of internal control defect discovery and rectification (usually with a target of 100%), and the amount of customer information security investment (annual investment is often measured in billions of RMB). By triangulating official regulatory data, company disclosure information and third-party ratings, you can draw a high-precision, multi-dimensional dynamic graph of PING AN compliance, which is far more reliable than simply trusting a brand logo.