AIA Group Limited (1299) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

AIA is the leading pan Asian life and health insurance company with operations across 18 markets. We are 100% focused in Asia, the fastest-growing and most attractive region in the world. And we have 100% ownership in all of our markets. Our strategy is built on 5 long-term structural growth drivers for life and health insurance in Asia, unprecedented wealth creation, a significant need for private protection, rapidly shifting consumer mindsets, pervasiveness of new technologies and embracing purpose, sustainability and resilience. AIA has a long and proud history of helping people withstand unforeseen events in their lives. It is the foundation of our business and our purpose to help people live healthier, longer, better lives. We do this through our products and services by actively promoting the health and well-being of our customers, employees and agents and the communities in which we operate. Over the last 18 months, the world has changed. But despite the global disruption, everyone is more aware of their health and wellness, driving greater demand for our comprehensive protection products. And AIA's accelerated use of technology, digital and analytics throughout our business had been crucial in supporting our customers, agents and partners while continuing our strong track record of growing shareholder value.

In August 2020, we introduced our clear and ambitious strategy, leveraging the 5 structural drivers of growth in Asia. The heart of this strategy is a step change in technology, digital and analytics that transforms AIA into an organization of the future. Today, we will demonstrate how we are leveraging the power of TDA to capture new growth opportunities, driving productivity improvements and greater efficiency across the group. This has been a critical factor in AIA's successful navigation through the pandemic, enabling us to support our employees, customers, distributors and partners when they have needed it most. We help our customers navigate uncertainty with uninterrupted support as we embrace new ways of working across the group and our accelerated program supported our continued delivery of strong financial results during the pandemic. In China, since 2019, our VONB growth has outperformed the market by over 30%. And in the first half of 2021, VONB for all of our reportable segments other than Hong Kong exceeded their pre-pandemic levels. As we further embed TDA in our businesses, we enhance AIA's resilience and our abilities to capture the immense growth opportunities across Asia.

At AIA, we are leveraging TDA across every aspect of our business as we transform into a customer-centric digital insurance. Through a comprehensive investment program, we are upgrading all of our 18 business units to achieve our vision of a future-proof AIA. That is simpler faster and more connected. The fundamental shift is built on world-class technology that is efficient, scalable and agile. Our cloud-first policy and modern modular architecture is fully automated, always on and unleashes the power of big data and artificial intelligence. We are already far ahead of the industry, and we are on track for the group to reach our target state by 2023. This modern technology core is foundation for a digital step change in our customer and distributor experiences. Our vision is best-in-class connectivity for our agents, partners and customers. Interactions are rapid and seamless with almost all processes automated and virtually no human intervention. Everything we do is powered by AI and analytics, providing intelligent service and incredible personalization, powerful digital tools enhanced agent productivity and professionalism across every aspect of the value chain. With automation, we free up our agents from routine admin tasks, making them significantly more efficient and effective as they concentrate on what they do best, providing high-quality advice for our customers. Our plug-and-play modular systems enable quick and easy integration with partners and delivery of shared value outcomes. This is what makes AIA the go-to company for partners across Asia. Across all channels, customers can interact with us whenever they want through simplified and intuitive processes, all built on principles of human-centered design. We know that providing integrated services with faster turnaround times leads to better business outcomes, including improved retention and enhanced financial performance. Our systematic and agile approach to TDA transformation is a great example of the power of AIA as a group. We take best practices from one part of the group and replicate them across our other businesses. And when we create new capabilities, we test and learn in one area before industrializing across the rest of the group. As we embed TDA across the group's front office, middle office and back office from sales and services through investments, risk, compliance, human resources and finance, we are transforming AIA into a world-class digital insurer.

Step change in our TDA capabilities is imperative to achieve our strategic priorities. Our transformation is progressing at pace and will deliver long-term profitable growth well into the future. In today's presentation, we will take an in-depth look at how we are embedding TDA in every part of our business and delivering on our strategic priorities. Our TDA-led strategy builds on our significant competitive advantages further differentiates us from our competitors and will scale and enhance AIA's unrivaled quality distribution platform; provide personalized, innovative and compelling propositions to our customers, and deliver leading customer experiences and service standards. We will showcase how we are future proving our differentiated Premier Agency by driving scale, productivity and quality and how we are expanding across new provinces and cities in China efficiently and at scale. Our capability and track record makes us the partner of choice for leading banks and digital platforms across the region. We will demonstrate how we leverage TDA to better connect and serve customers through a true omnichannel model, bringing AIA new growth opportunities. TDA is helping us deliver innovative propositions with speed and scale, providing many new and exciting services to our customers through exclusive partnerships with best-in-class providers, helping them better manage their health and financial well-being. One great example is AIA Vitality. And you will see how our signature program drives positive behavioral change, better health outcomes and higher shareholder value. And through TDA, we are creating distinctive, personalized and more meaningful experiences for our customers such as Xiao Bang, our award-winning AI virtual assistant that allows us to handle extensive customer interactions while delivering a high-quality and personalized experience. Our unrivaled distribution compelling propositions and leading customer experience are key to fulfilling our purpose of helping millions of people live healthier, longer, better lives. And extending our track record of delivering long-term shareholder value. We have lots of exciting things to share with you today. So let's get started.

Our multichannel distribution platform gives AIA unrivaled access to billions of new and existing customers across Asia. We provide a choice of engagement models from our proprietary Premier Agency through our extensive range of leading banks and distribution partners through group, corporate and SME schemes our growing partnerships with digital platforms and even direct to consumers for simple products. Core to serving our customers is our relentless focus on high-quality professional advice. And that's how we target and meet the immense protection and long-term savings and needs in Asia. Across distribution platforms, our strategic priorities are to grow scale and productivity as we deliver ever more personalized and high-quality advice. We are building on the strong capabilities and digital foundations developed over many years, including iPoS, our leading point-of-sale system and our advanced performance management tools. Further embedding TDA is central to our ability to deliver on our ambitions for each of our key distribution channels as we amplify our competitive advantages and drive sustainable growth. Let's start with our core channel, Premier Agency. Since IPO, AIA's agency channel value of new business has grown more than 6x. And for a president at 7 consecutive years have been the #1 Million Dollar Round Table company in the world. Our differentiated Premier Agency strategy is fundamental to this impressive growth with a focus on recruiting, developing and retaining our highly productive professional agents. At the heart of our strategy is our very strong value proposition for our agents built on high-quality recruitment standards, best-in-class tools and long-term career growth opportunities. These help deliver highly attractive incomes and a sustainable growth model for our agents. Our TDA strategy is designed to augment every aspect of the agency value chain, empowering agents and agency leaders every step of the weight. AIA's Premier Agents are our key competitive advantage through which we are capturing the immense opportunities presented by Asia's huge and growing middle class. Our investment in TDA continues to enhance our agents' capabilities and productivity, allowing us to reach deep into the heart of Asia.

AIA China leverages TDA to enable us to capture the extraordinary opportunity that Mainland China presents for us. Powerful digital platforms support our high quality and differentiated agency which outperforms our major competitors by a wide margin, and we will continue to scale up our highly productive full-time agency force as leverage our unique opportunity and expand geographically. Our expansion strategy is ambitious as we access a 5x increase in our target market to over 600 million potential customers to fully leverage this opportunity, our TDA transformation is critical. We have built a scalable operating model with rapidly deployable platform tools and processes, backed by a centralized shared services, enabling us to establish new offices and expand our Premier Agency efficiently and at scale. And our premium agents are able to get to work immediately supported by our readily available digital tools and established operations. Our recent launch in Sichuan province is a great example of the power of our model. Our well-known brand and attractive aging value proposition allowed us to recruit more than 400 agents comprising over 70% university graduates in just 4 months, and we are in process of repeating this in this next province. We recently received regulatory approval to start operations in our newest branch in Hubei, which is eighth largest province by GDP. The key to replicating and growing our premium agency model is the digital tools we have built and deployed across the entire aging value chain, recruitment, training, management prospecting, sales and servicing. High adoption and the quality of these tools have driven significant increase in agent productivity and helped differentiate AIA China's premium agency from the industry. Supporting recruitment is our own end-to-end recruitment platform iRecruit. This includes smart tools across pipeline management, selection, interview and career planning. It's also seamlessly integrated with the onboarding process and the next stage of agency training and development, enabling a smooth and personalized new recruit journey from Day 1. Our premium agents are the best in the industry. We provide support and development through our with our comprehensive e-learning platform. We have built a data-driven competence assessment engine to evaluate and read each agent across critical skills such as professional knowledge, business development, performance management and new agent recruitment. By combining the assessment result with agency leader improved, every agent has a tailored training plan to accelerate their development. Next, we have Master Planner. Our market-leading management tool designed for agents and agency leaders. This is the 1 customer relationship management system, providing our premium agents with streamlined marketing and activity management functionalities. For agency leaders, Master Planner is a powerful tool for team and business management. Leaders are provided with real-time tracking of key activity and sales information to help improve individual agent performance, better manage their teams and plan strategically. Master Planner also includes a joint field work system. New agents joined real customer meetings with their leaders, a critical element of developing our high-quality differentiated premium agents. In China, our agents have been using social media marketing since 2013. Our integrated WeChat best digital platform enables agents to enlarge social influence, acquire and engage prospects and achieve conversion using a wide range of segment-specific digital content, engagement activities and campaigns. Moving to sales. Our premium agents are encrypted with our fast and seamless end-to-end digital sales platform, Instant buy. This includes our air sign functionality that enables remote calls. In July, we launched a new tool for needs best advisory. This allows our agents to deliver greater personalization and focus further on the evolving needs of our customers. With OCR, optical character recognition technology and building industry product reference library, the 2 performance real-time insurance coverage analysis for customers and their family across burst AIA and non-AIA policies. We then provide individualized gap analysis and tailored product recommendation for customers supported by our data-driven people like you function. Only AIA's premium agents have the capability, tools and propositions to provide high-quality, personalized advice that meets the constantly evolving needs of our customers. And our agents are able to maintain lifetime connection and relationship with our customers through professional and high-quality services supported by our advanced or platform for online claims submission and a fast and seamless claims service with a fully digitalized agency value chain, the next stage of our TDA strategy is scaling up our use of analytics and AI. Backed by analytics and using rich data sets, we are building powerful applications to further drive recruitment scale, enhance quality and increase productivity through predictive sales and business management. For example, we launched advanced career appraisal on iRecruit this year for better selection and conversion, powered by dynamic questionnaires and a smart assessment engine, this provides recruiters with candidate companies assessment and recommendations in real time. We are also deploying a powerful predictive performance management model on Master Planner for early detection, early intervention and early remediation. This continually assesses agent behaviors and activities automatically generating analytics with actionable insights for agency leaders to follow up. Many of our agent applications and supporting tools are powered by AIA. And importantly, they are all available to our agents 24 hours and 7 days. Our intelligent AI personnel assistant provides our agents with instant answers a huge range of possible inquiries from policy information to underwriting rules. To reinforce training with practical experience, we have also developed our AI-enabled training simulation tool. This helps agents to practice a wide range of customer interaction scenarios. Using natural language processing and voice recognition technology, the agent is given real-time feedback and their professional knowledge and the quality of customer engagement. As we further leverage analytics and AI in our digital tools across the entire value chain, we aim to drive another step change in productivity, the quality and further differentiate our premium agency. China presents an incredible opportunity for AIA. We have significant headroom for growth in our established operations and every new province, we enter brings new greenfield opportunities with many millions of potential new customers. This opportunity is unique to AIA and our highly scalable operating model and the leading premium agency powered by TDA enables us to access this opportunity efficiently and as scaled, as we help millions more Chinese families live healthier, longer, better lives.

In Malaysia, TDA has been instrumental in our delivery of strong results for 2020 and 2021 and has helped us remain the market-leading agency by MDRT. At the center of this story is the Life Planner app, our powerful end-to-end one-stop platform for our agents. The Life Planner app includes elements model on the proven tools we have developed and adopted in other markets like master planner, which Fisher talked about earlier. This demonstrates how we locally leverage the power of the AI group and replicate our success in multiple markets. This app enables a greater productivity by digitally enabling our agents to do their job. It provides timely and extensive information about our customers in Malaysia and allows our agents to provide appropriate advice to our customers through their evolving life stages. The widespread adoption of the Life Planner app has allowed us to conduct an incredible amount of our business virtually, providing greater resilience and helping us to grow the business to the pandemic. Today, I'm proud to say that all recruitment in Malaysia is done digitally. That is 100% of premier advisers recruited and trained digitally ensuring that agents adopt new ways of working from day 1. Our approach to customer acquisition has shifted dramatically in the last 18 months, seamless integration with social media and third-party digital partners is a powerful capability for our agents to build their sales pipeline. The app is instrumental in helping agents develop consistent and long-lasting sales habits. This is achieved through gamification, continuously reinforcing successful sales behaviors and increasing the productivity of our agents. And the sales process is fast and frictionless with remote completion and online payment capabilities being just some of the easy-to-use features, facilitating a seamless customer journey. Our Life Planner app is a key differentiator in the Malaysian market and a critical enabler for increasing scale and enhancing quality at the same time.

At AIA, Singapore, our goal is to be the most digitally enabled insurer. We have been on our digital transformation journey for several years. However, we have significantly accelerated since the start of the pandemic. The quality of our digital tools have driven high adoption rates among our premier agents across the value chain. Our powerful, all-in-one app iSmart helps our agents manage and nurture deeper relationships with customers, integrating cross-functional capabilities into a seamless experience. Digital adoption is increasing and over 70% of our agents now use iSmart. Our agents in Singapore benefit from many of the tools you have heard about from Fisher and Ben, particularly, I will focus on digital engagement through social media channels and our remote sales capabilities. We have integrated social media marketing capabilities directly into iSmart, creating new and compelling ways for our agents to attract and engage with new customers. Our vision is to transform every agent into a Social Chief Marketing Officer. And all of this happens within iSmart with capabilities supporting social media, marketing and lead management. We provide agents with curated digital marketing content that's easily shareable across a range of social media and messaging platforms. And we back that up with analytics-driven customer insights that support greater customer personalization and highly relevant products and offers. We use a highly efficient and systematic approach to lead generation, nurturing and management, which helps us to further improve sales conversion whilst delivering a superior customer experience. Agents are provided personalized links that can be shared with customers, enabling self-purchase of simple products on our AIA now e-commerce platform in a few simple steps. The results have been impressive. More than 60% of our agents share digital content every month. Over 390,000 digital leads have been generated since January 2020, generating SGD 89 million ANP. In 2020, iSmart won the MobacGold Award for best use of mobile insurance services. For our agents to convert leads seamlessly, we have a fully interactive digital sales platform with 100% remote sales capability and fast policy issuance. This platform is integrated with Singapore Gulf Tech services for greater speed and convenience while maintaining a high level of security. We use my info to pre-populate customer info from Singapore's national identity database. This eliminates the need to submit hard copy identification and remove manual verification steps to support faster turnaround times. We are the first insurer in Singapore to implement sign with Sign to digitally sign applications securely and conveniently. Our digital sales platform is further integrated with digital underwriter for immediate auto underwriting and pay easy for fast free online payments, allowing us to issue policy contracts in less than 2 hours.

The second pillar of our unrivaled distribution is our extensive portfolio of strategic partners across Asia, a unique and valuable asset for AIA. Our high-quality Bancassurance partners have leading retail positions across many of our markets and provide access to over 150 million customers. The majority of our strategic Bancassurance partners have over 10 years left to run, providing us significant potential for growth. Our new digitally led approach to bank distribution is addressing the limitations of the traditional in-branch sales model. We are deploying differentiated propositions centered around health, wellness and lifestyle related solutions, including AIA Vitality to drive customer engagement and affinity through underlying channels. As customer preferences evolve, we offer more choice of how to purchase from face-to-face to fully online advice, simple, streamlined and integrated sales processes deliver a frictionless customer journey, so our partners can focus on creating value for their customers. We use data-driven marketing propensity models to better target in-branch customers and provide broader access to previously untapped online credit card systems. Again, leveraging TDA, we are creating sustainable long-term growth opportunities and productivity improvements for AIA and our partners. In India, Tata AIA Life has pioneered our use of digital and analytics tools, transforming our approach to partnership business and we are industrializing these tools and other partnerships across the group.

Tata AIA leads the group and the Indian market in partnering with both traditional players such as banks and brokers and new era digital platforms. We are a differentiated and highly focused multichannel business, with the most productive agents in the market. We are a leader in protection business in a market that has low insurance penetration and a large protection gap. Our partners include leading domestic banks, multinational banks and these provide us access to 12,000 branches across the country and more than 100 million retail customers. To support our bank partners' online customer journeys, we have adopted a fully digitalized and remote assisted sales process. This allows for our customers to be onboarded within 35 minutes. Our deep integration with partner systems allows us to capture leads directly from dedicated CRM tools that combine customer data with AIA's advanced analytic techniques, including propensity model. Integration with credit bureaus, government databases, third-party administrators all of this has allowed us a rapid transfer of data, enabling seamless customer onboarding experience, simplified underwriting and issuance process and also compliance with regulatory requirements, such as know your customer applications. Using these deep connections, we have digitalized payments, policy completion and submission meaning that both customer and agent can complete the process anytime, anywhere and with minimal friction to arrive at issuance. With this digital integration, we can see the positive impact on the top line, the bottom line end productivity and in wallet share. We understand bancassurance well. We have used our wealth of experience to create an incredibly attractive proposition. These tools and systems are now helping us expand our reach to a whole new category of business partners. Policybazaar, for example, is India's largest online digital insurance marketplace with a 93% market share.

Policybazaar accounts for almost a fourth of India's total life cover. Technology is a enabler of business. I would look at technology for technology sake, tough in artificial intelligence, data analytics, voice analytics, behavior and analytics. But we do it because it makes sense for that particular purpose in the business. And because it adds something. Tata and the Policybazaar team have diligently worked on each area, which was a bottleneck. I think the partnership is based on a lot of trust. There are very strong partner. I think a very long-term partner. We still have a lot of product innovation to do. Still only about 10% of people in India who can buy life insurance and have bought life insurance.

Seamless partner integration and simplicity of execution. These are the key to driving value through partnerships. Tata AIA does this more successfully by delivering a seamless experience for both our distributors and customers. A broad range of system integration, advanced analytics, omnichannel sales journeys that align to customer preference are the foundations of our bancassurance strategy. These are helping us engage with many more new customers and will support growth across our impressive portfolio of partners in India for many years to come.

I'm very passionate about the potential of digital platform partners that bring new models for distribution and new growth for AIA. We have an expanding network of best digital platform partners with hundreds of millions of highly engaged and active users. We work with our partners to develop and deliver highly relevant and personalized propositions. AIA's significant competitive advantages and deep experience in Asia makes us a great fit for these platforms. And as we further enhance our TDA capabilities, become increasingly attractive to digital partners that can bring significant new value pools to AIA. The strength of our multichannel distribution offers customers more choice and how they access our products and advice from fully online to face-to-face, supporting customers' preferences, improved engagement, increases conversion rates and maximizes value creation. And importantly, it further strengthens and differentiates our Premier Agency by bringing in new customer leads and incremental growth. We use an agile approach, enabling faster iteration cycles when developing compelling solutions as we test and learn in one market before industrializing across others. In South Korea, we brought together SK Telecom, Samsung Card and AIA Vitality to launch a constellation of new joint propositions targeting a combined customer base of 40 million people.

Our digital platform partnership strategy is radical and pioneering. We built partnership with a strong win-win alignment to attract customers for us and our partners business, leveraging joint data analytics and digital marketing capabilities. Here in South Korea, we are a partner with to the most trusted and best-in-class brand SK Telecom and Samsung Card. The scale and the reach of these partners, combined with everything that AIA brings to the table has allowed us, create some truly exciting innovations, especially in the health and wellness space. First, SK Telecom. They are the largest mobile operator in Korea with nearly 50% market share. With SK Telecom, we launched AIA Vitality in 2018, the first health awareness platform for the Korean market. November 2020, we transitioned to a fee-based AIA Vitality proposition. The first in-market insurance product with dynamic pricing, along with a variety of other lifestyle benefits for our customers. In August 2021, we extended our strategic partnership by integrating with T Universe. SK Telecom's newly launched subscription platform, which offers a wide range of services to their existing customer base and beyond. A powerful and highly visible initiative, we introduced the Samsung Galaxy smartphone and watch program. With this program, customers can purchase a Galaxy Z Fold3, a Galaxy Z Flip3 smartphone or Galaxy Watch4, alongside AIA Vitality insurance product at a bundled discount price. We leveraged the new Samsung Galaxy product to generate higher customer acquisition with SK Telecom, higher insurance version for AIA and the higher uptake for Samsung Electronic, it perfectly calculates our win-win partnership strategy. This program also provides us with access to Samsung S Health members where we can incorporate members' health data, along with AIA Vitality data for better customer insights and targeted positive underwriting offers. What's truly exciting and unique about this program is that this isn't simply plugging in the existing digital platform. Rather, we are actively expanding ecosystem with a shared offering. This creates significant benefits to all partners and customers that come from an enriched customer proposition, data sharing and join analytics. Also with Samsung Card, we created a co-branded credit card creates very first health and wellness credit card, which launched on September 30. Samsung Card is the #2 player in Korea with close to 20% market share. It is an excellent example of our win-win digital platform partnership model and actions, provides customer acquisition for Samsung Card. And in turn, higher insurance conversion and retention. It further strengthens the ecosystem with transaction touch points, turn around health-in-one AIA. Strong integration and alignment between AIA Vitality and Samsung Card was vital to realize the customer benefits of the me and we co-branded cards, which includes discounts on AIA insurance and AIA Vitality membership fee to access personalized loyalty and lifestyle benefits. We also recently launched a loan protection offering with Samsung Card, known as AIA credit child insurance through a seamless integration with the Samsung Card app. This is a powerful partnership. Samsung issued some 100,000 new personal loans per month, generating considerable customer insights and data for an affluent customer segment within an immense digital ecosystem. We are incredibly excited about our digital platform partnership and committed to working with the strategic partners, SK Telecom and Samsung Card, who are both equally enthusiastic by developing this new digitalized business model together.

Right across Asia, you can see the impact of AIA's bold and dynamic TDA transformation on our distribution platform. We are enhancing and scaling our industry-leading distribution platform across Premier Agency, partnerships, group and corporate solutions and digital platform partners. And it is clear that TDA is at the core of our success, driving the adoption of powerful digital tools and deploying advanced analytics across the group allow us to increase productivity, enhance quality at scale and accelerate growth. We have shown you the power of our proven approach of developing best-in-class solutions in one-market before replicating and industrializing across the group. Our shared value approach makes us a highly attractive partner everywhere we go. And we are deploying digital-led models to access significant new growth opportunities. And with our seamless online to off-line journeys, digitally originated leads are enhancing the productivity of our Premier Agency further differentiating us against the industry as we deliver even more personalized advice. AIA's unrivaled distribution is a key pillar of delivering of our purpose of helping millions more people across Asia with healthier, longer, better light.

At AIA, we're committed to leading the industry in innovating and providing compelling propositions that we believe are fundamentally difficult to replicate and reinforce our competitive advantages. Our investments in TDA, particularly in our health and wellness ecosystem, enable us to provide integrated and personalized journeys for our customers that really do deliver better health outcomes. At the core of our ecosystem is AIA Vitality, our comprehensive wellness program that is integrated into our insurance propositions. Let me explain why. We believe a healthier Asia is the most important and valuable impact we can have on our communities today and in the future. Our purpose is now more relevant and resonant than ever over the last 3 decades, Asia has become rapidly wealthier but not healthier. Lifestyle-related diseases are prevalent accounting for more than 70% of all deaths, modifiable factors such as physical inactivity, poor nutrition, smoking and excess alcohol have continued to fuel the rise of noncommunicable diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, respiratory and heart disease as well as mental disorders and conditions. Mounting evidence now demonstrates the link between poor health and the environment. Air pollution is second only to tobacco smoking in causing global NCDs. As the largest life health and wellness provider in the region, serving the needs of millions of customers, we recognize that it's critically important for AIA to play an active role in reversing these concerning trends and to lead the industry by being at the forefront of change. AIA Vitality exemplifies our purpose to help people live healthier, longer and better lives. It's a comprehensive wellness program that incorporates lifestyle rewards to drive positive behavioral change and puts members in control of improving their long-term health. Through AIA Vitality, we fully embraced and adopted a shared value model, where we operate in a way that delivers economic value for shareholders while also creating value for society, tying our financial success to community success. Fundamental to this is our belief that when we provide our customers with financial products and health care services that integrate rewards and incentives, we can successfully enable behavioral change and motivate our customers to realize better personal health outcomes and thus healthier lives. This is a win for AIA, a win for the customer and of course, a win for society. AIA was the first in Asia to launch this scientifically proven wellness program, and we were the first to recognize that proactive health management offers people a more sustainable lifestyle. AIA Vitality engages with members digitally and encourages them to take responsibility for their own wellness. It tracks activity and health data and is tailored to a customer's specific needs, using human center design, it's sophisticated easy-to-use navigation system delivered through smart devices, allowing customers to earn points across multiple wellness dimensions. Physical activity, nutrition, mental health and sleep are core program components with members striving continually to level up to access greater lifestyle rewards across 4 status tiers bronze, silver, gold and platinum adding challenging gamification for members. The beauty of AIA Vitality is its simplicity, know your health, improve your help, get rewarded and lead a more rewarding life. To understand more about how customers experience AIA Vitality, let's meet Ava.

Ava is 28 years old and the primary school teacher, as part of her personal health and wellness plan, she had a conversation with an AIA agent about her financial planning, and were surprised that rather than the conversation being about illness or death, the AIA agent instead emphasized the foundational role that good health plays in financial planning, finding the policy perfect for her needs. Ava purchases the AIA medical insurance plan and the small AIA Vitality membership fee is added to her premiums. Once logged in, Ava browsers the different activities, which can earn her AIA Vitality points. These points earn her rewards and translate into savings on her insurance premium. Ava uses the health online assessments to understand her health status better, she set ourself some simple health goals to eat more healthily and continue exercising regularly. Ava also got a fitness tracker with her AIA Vitality member discount automating your ability to track her health progress. She can even earn points from tracking her sleep. After a few weeks, Ava's points are accumulating, and she is well on her way to raising her AIA Vitality status. She has also earned movie tickets from time to time as part of the reward program. Ava books a health check through 1 of AIA's network of health providers. Ava continues to make use of the everyday features, including the AI-based food scoring tool which gives her feedback on her daily meals as well as access on demand to a network of nutrition coaches. Some of Avis friends are also members of AIA Vitality, and they have set up a challenge group within the app. Ava finds this is great extra motivation and helps her exercise regularly by staying active on the AIA Vitality program, Ava easily reaches gold and is steadily approaching platinum status. She enjoys the premium discounts and other benefits on her plans every year. By achieving platinum status, Ava did not have to pay for the deductible amount and got a rewards and benefits upgrade for free. By staying healthy, Ava did not make any claims. As a reward, AIA credited money into her health wallet. Through a commitment to exercising regularly and eating healthier, she's been able to improve her biometrics and earns AIA Vitality booster points. Ava continues to live healthier, longer and better with AIA Vitality.

We're proud that we have over 1.3 million active AIA Vitality members who perform 700,000 workouts each day. This increase in physical activity directly correlates with better health outcomes for our members. For example, 52% of at-risk customers have seen their blood pressure levels improve and 72% of at-risk customers have seen their blood glucose levels decline. Not only does AIA Vitality create value for customers through better clinical health outcomes, it produces significant competitive advantages for AIA, enabling us to attract new customers and improve financial results. Mobile by design, the program appeals to young, healthy customers who might otherwise not be keen to buy insurance, for example, AIA Vitality customers are 4 years younger than non-Vitality customers in both Singapore and Thailand. In the last 3.5 years, we've generated more than USD 1.6 billion in VONB from integrated product sales, reflecting the resonance, relevance and strength of AIA Vitality's value proposition. As our members achieve better health outcomes, claims performance improves. For example, at AIA Australia, hospital claims for gold and platinum customers are 15% lower than for bronze members, lower claims and higher persistency, create an actuarial surplus that's channeled back into the program enhancement. Members then benefit from cheaper insurance and more comprehensive protection, making our products significantly more competitive and attractive. Superior customer preference to AIA means lower lapse and higher propensity to purchase additional products. For example, gold and platinum AIA Vitality customers have up to 50% lower lapse rate. and purchase additional products at a rate 80% higher compared to non-Vitality customers. Our agents who sell AIA Vitality integrated products are 4x more productive than standard agents. They have more touch points with their customers on their health journeys, giving them multiple opportunities to engage and cross-sell.

AIA Vitality is our signature Wellness program and core to us being a shared value insurer. It also holds a central position in delivering on our payer-to-partner ambition by providing end-to-end health and wellness journeys to our customers, using the strategic framework of predict, prevent, diagnose, treat and recover or PPDTR. Under this framework, we partner with best-in-class solution providers to deliver relevant and personalized interventions and services across the PPDTR journey. They provide the right care at the right time to improve health and wellness outcomes. We are expanding our partnerships with providers that demonstrate clinical efficacy and scalability in Asia, enabling us to deliver health and wellness journeys, integrated with our insurance product to deliver differentiated customer propositions. The COVID-19 pandemic has structurally altered attitudes and access to telemedicine usage in Asia with overall initial online telemedicine consultations increasing 84% in the first half of 2021. We have seen markets such as Singapore realize over a tenfold increase in initial consultations since the onset of the pandemic as customer preferences have shifted. And as customer demand evolves, we are expanding telemedicine services from 6 to 10 markets already in 2021 to match these needs.

And we are making it easier for customers to use our health and wellness services in our development of integrated digital platforms with a focus on a superior user experience, but life in China as an initial market. So let's see what this means for our customers.

Curious non-AIA customers creates an account in seconds and discovered a cool facial biomarker for health data and a compelling cool to action, to sign up, to learn more on staying healthy. An existing customer who doesn't feel well, logs in and scan results show elevated blood pressure. Symptom check results suggest a medical consults. Checking is covered for telemedicine consults is easy, then he orders an online prescription to be delivered. A policyholder who is strength about her financial situation, clicks pool direction to land more, begins the financial health assessment, receives a financial health score and insight and contact AIA to start a retirement plan. The lifestyle super app will also accelerate our journey to becoming a digital leader by connecting best-in-class services, features and journeys to give everyone a best-in-class digital experience.

As a Pan-Asian health insurer with market-leading positions in the medical tourism hubs of the region, we are uniquely positioned in the regional health care provider network we can offer to customers. AIA's regional health passport connects customers to preferred quality providers in Asia's key health care hub markets, enabling cross-border, cashless access to treatment and peace of mind to our customers. Customers can access the right care in their preferred location with this pre-authorized cashless access. To understand this a little better, let's now get a deeper insight into how our health and wellness ecosystem is delivering on healthier, longer, better lives with the CEO of AIA Australia, Damian Mu.

We've had a Vitality in place since 2014, and it's really pretty much embedded in everything we do. And we've built a whole health and well-being ecosystem around that. I'm extremely excited about AIA vitality. It's at the heart of what we do at AIA Australia. It's really about how we deliver on our purpose of making a difference in people's lives and how we champion the dream of healthier, longer, better lives. It's really core to how we engage with our customers now to -- through health and well-being ecosystem. We have a range of programs depending on what issues and the illnesses our customers are going through to support in the system. I think pain coaching not so the latest stats 1,000 of our customers have gone through that. It's great to have great programs. But unless we make it simple and easy and be simple, fast and more connected for our customers to access those, they're not going to access them. There'll be great programs that sort of sit there on a shelf, right? And when you've got such great programs, which sets a great results, the key and the ambition is to get them to as many people as we can, as many Australians as we can. So TDA is really about a significant enablement of that proposition and that ecosystem right into the palms of our customers' hands so that they can access it by the touch of a button. And so it's a higher take-up of AIA propositions and products, better retention because they're engaged with us and of course, better claims. So that's a great benefit for AIA. But then by doing that, that's having a profound and positive impact on society, right and the economy. So it's more affordable, so and attainable for them to access their insurance propositions. It actually helps them lead healthy and longer better lives. And that's the dream. So that for me is about what shared value is. Win-win-win.

Our health and wellness ecosystem with AIA Vitality at its core is the perfect example of the innovative and compelling propositions we're launching across all our markets. We're empowering our customers and distributors through the power of TDA, technology, digital and analytics enables incredible personalization of propositions and advice as we meet the needs of millions of our customers. All of this adds up to compelling propositions that are difficult to replicate, driving long-term sustainability and growing shareholder value.

We pride ourselves on anticipating the ever-evolving needs of our customers. That means assess and information across their learn, buy, service and claim journeys on any platform and at any time. Through our investments in TDA, we can provide an easier, more efficient and more customer life experience for our customers. We leverage the power of analytics and artificial intelligence to better understand and serve our customers, interactions with agents and partners and increasingly direct with AIA, are rapid, seamless and accurate. Thanks to our leading digital apps and tools. This best-in-class experience is driven by our guiding principles of simplicity, timeliness and reliability.

At AIA China, we have built an end-to-end digitalized customer journey, driving high levels of digital adoption and automation. Customers have access to apps, tools and services to support them across their learn, buy, services, and claim journeys. And many of our processes have been automated. So response is almost instant. Our customers value the services highly and AIA has ranked as #1 on CES and NPS for the last 4 years, and our apps are also very highly rated. Understanding our customers is key to delivering the best experiences. And through TDA, we have built continuous and real-time customer feedback systems. With 11 different touch points covering buy, service and claim journeys, we collect customer feedback in real time. Over the past 3 years, we have acted on the insights from more than 250,000 customer surveys. This results inform ongoing improvements at all levels of the organization, enabling deeper and more timely engagement with greater personalization. So how do we maintain this leading customer experience as our business grow ever larger? Xiao Bang, our AI personal assistant.

[Foreign Language]

Since launching in 2020, Xiao Bang started out making basic outbound calls and has grown up to handle more complex 2-way conversations. Xiao Bang is even able to pick up on the announce of our customers' voice through emotion tracking. Xiao Bang utilize a combination of cruise take models, emotion recognition and over 500 risk factors, creating a sense of trust and understanding for customers. Xiao Bang has a growing portfolio of applications which bring direct financial benefits to the company, opportunities that would otherwise be impossible. It allows us to systematically engage with more customers that has skilled previously unimaginable. For example, Xiao Bang automatically calls customers with overdue premiums and intelligently manage over 50 interaction scenarios and over 110 customer response scenarios. Already, this has helped to recover more than RMB 1 billion of premium in the last 18 months and ensure thousands of our customers continue to be protected by AIA. With each interaction, Xiao Bang is learning and growing continuously updating its database and capabilities. In this way, Xiao Bang's involvement of our vision of delivering a leading customer experience, constantly involving to meet our customers' needs.

Health and wellness is core to our business. In Singapore, we have focused our innovation efforts on providing a comprehensive and seamless health, wellness and claims experience for our customers. We are committed to provide greater peace of mind with financial assurance so that customers can focus on recovery. This is powered by our AI platform, Claims EZ. Customers can use this to submit medical claims on the goal and Claims EZ made us the first insurer in Singapore to introduce a fully digital health shoe pre-authorization for our customers, agents and doctors. It is also augmented with remote authentication capabilities to enable our agents to assist customers with their submissions electronically, powering Claims EZ is a smart OCR engine that auto abstracts information from invoices and bills and applies AI and supervise machine learning technologies for auto claims assessment. And it is also integrated with PayNow, Singapore's secure fund transfer for immediate and cashless claims disbursement. The results are dramatic. 100% of all pre-authorization requests are assessed using claims easy with over 84% approved within one day. Our customers can concentrate solely on their recovery without concern about costs. 98% of AIA Health shoe claims are assessed by the AI engine with 60% processed with no human intervention. At AIA Singapore, 60% of claims are paid out within 24 hours. Perhaps the most compelling results of all is a 20% improvement in claims satisfaction within 1 year. Doctors from private hospitals have also given positive feedback on our Claims EZ pre-authorization being fast-free, easy to use with a speedy turnaround time. Our efforts have been recognized in the industry. In 2021, we have won several awards for Claims EZ on technology, innovation and customer experience.

AIA Malaysia is a market leader in customer experience. Our mission to help our customers lead healthier, longer, better life is one which resonates well with the market. All this is enabled through MyAIA, our award-winning comprehensive app. MyAIA provides customers with a digital platform to engage in our total health and wellness solutions, including innovative AIA Vitality propositions to help our customers live their best lives. Through a host of strategic partnerships, every step of the PPDTR journey is covered in our total health solution to help customers predict, prevent, diagnose, treat and recover. At the core of predict and prevent is AIA Vitality, our integrated wellness program that encourages and fosters good habits for a healthy lifestyle. To provide our customers with even more support, they will also have access to an extensive network of nutrition coaching, weight management and chronic disease management services with health care technology company, holmusk. But if something does go wrong, a diagnosis is just one tap away through our telemedicine partner Doc2Us streamline platform, customers can consult with a physician, receive a diagnosis and have medicines delivered right to their front door. For more serious conditions, medical management solutions company, Medix, provides access to an international network of specialists to advise and guide customers through the most suitable treatment options and latest clinical trials. In addition to our customers' physical well-being, we also prioritize their financial well-being. The financial health check on MyAIA provides customers with an overview of their insurance covers helping them understand which areas have gapped and providing personalized solutions as their financial needs change throughout their life. So far, over 180,000 customers have completed a financial health check. This is an important step in the process for regular engagement, a way for agents to keep on top of customers evolving life stages so that we can be an active partner in the lives and driving increased customer lifetime value. AIA Malaysia's TDA journey has successfully brought us to a place where we are able to provide a wide range of self-served frictionless services and unique experiences. Our integrated shared value proposition is delivered through a deeply personalized service to our customers with easy access to best-in-class partners, we offer the right care when it is needed with clinical efficacy. Above all, we offer confidence and peace of mind, which are what our customers value and come to expect from AIA. Our customers agree and are responding well to it. MyAIA already has over 1 million registered users and high ratings on the App Store. Our agents have generated over 400,000 digital leads. And the digital tools we have created are being put to good use. Nearly all applications and claims are submitted digitally and 100% of claims are paid digitally.

I'm incredibly excited about the next stage of our TDA development for customers because it's One Experience. This is a step change in our use of TDA, a completely digital, data-driven and integrated customer services, nurturing and engagement platform. One Experience is designed to further enhance our customer experience and affinity while creating a multitude of a business benefit for AIA through greater customer insights, it brings together AIA's comprehensive propositions, including health and wellness, wealth management, retirement and legacy planning, segment-specific social media content activities, privileges and tools designed to drive higher awareness and engagement, backed by a powerful data mart and customer tagging system. One Experience can bring us rich behavior data and generate many actionable insights. This will lead customer experience into the next level as we engage our customers in a much more personalized in a targeted way and build lifetime affinity. One Experience will seamlessly integrate with our agency digital platform. Automatically providing our agents is relevant and timely hot leads, existing customer next best offers and sales opportunity prompts designed to deepen customer relation and significantly increase agent productivity. We will launch One Experience in December. Running on this platform and a strong data analytic capability, we will be able to engage more meaningfully with many small prospective customers via social media and third-party digital platforms, vastly increasing the pool of prospects from our premium agents.

Our commitment to a bold transformation of our customer experiences driven by our step change in TDA is already delivering impressive results and superior customer experiences. TDA enables us to provide a more efficient, convenient, engaging and highly personalized service. And as we continue to drive forward with our transformation. Everything we do is guided by our 3 principles of simplicity, timeliness and reliability. [Foreign Language]

Today, we have demonstrated how a step change in TDA is helping us to accelerate delivery of our key strategic priorities. As we further scale our unrivaled distribution across Asia, TDA supports us to increase productivity and create significant new growth opportunities through digital-led models at pace. We are future-proofing our industry-leading Premier Agency with intelligent digital tools across the entire value chain and continuously driving up quality. Our next-gen agency leaders can recruit, train and actively manage increasing numbers of new agents supported by data analytics and real-time performance management. We boost agent productivity with digitally sourced leads and a more personalized needs-based advice process for customers. The combination of TDA and our high-quality professional premier agents ensures that our platform remains differentiated from the rest of the industry as we drive increased scale and value of new business. Powered by TDA, we are able to seamlessly connect with our traditional and nontraditional partners and offer a consistent and integrated digital experience. Customers can choose how to interact with us from fully digital to remote assisted and face-to-face. We are driving greater productivity improvements through higher customer engagement and sales conversion rates. Digital-led models help us reach entirely new customer bases that we monetize through increased share of wallet. And increasingly rich customer data enables actionable insights for our distribution to drive repeat sales and increase customer lifetime value. Our investments in TDA enable us to provide innovative and personalized health and wellness journeys. AIA Vitality is the core engine for daily engagements that are delivering better share value outcomes, and higher customer engagement drives improved persistency, claims experience, risk management and value of new business. Digital tools, greater automation and analytics are transforming our customer experience leading to enhance operational efficiencies. Our AI-enabled claims processes result in higher accuracy and faster payments, while automation and AI achieves more personalized and consistent customer service, driving higher engagement and retention. In summary, our significant and targeted investments are transforming every aspect of our business with best-in-class tools and capabilities, driving higher productivity, increased customer loyalty better risk management and greater efficiencies. TDA is at the heart of our clear and ambitious strategy, which I am confident we achieve our purpose of helping millions of people live healthier, longer and better lives, while delivering profitable growth and shareholder value well into the future.

Joined by some of our management team featured in the presentation. In Hong Kong, we have Biswa, our Chief Technology Officer; and Stu, our Chief Marketing Officer; and joining us remotely are 3 of our market CEOs, Fisher from China; Se Kidd from Singapore and Naveen from India. And just before we start the Q&A, I want to point out that on our website, there is a downloadable version of the slides but some of which you've seen in the presentation today. With that, operator, we can go to Q&A, so please start the session.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of MW Kim from JPMorgan.

This is MW Kim from JPMorgan. Our back of propelling AIA, UKP strategy today. I have if I may. The first, TDA strategy looks to provide great benefit on new life growth, customer satisfaction and agent productivity. What could be the potential expected more benefit from all the life policy management under the TDA strategy in next 5 to 10 years with more detail, please. The next question is about the challenges following the TDA strategy. Each country seems to have a different way of delivering excellent outcomes such as more productivity or higher customer satisfaction, et cetera, on the TDA strategy. To my knowledge, AIA looks to have a more standardized TDA framework with locally customized solution. So my question is, could you please share the key challenges so far executing TDA strategy in each local market?

Okay. Thank you, MW for your 2 questions. I am very happy to connect with you again. As we shared during today's presentation, we have actually progressed -- we have made significant progress in our TDA journey. I'm very happy with the execution of our TDA strategy across all the markets, and we are well on our way to becoming a leading digital insurer. In fact, our achievements in the execution of our TDA strategy has been well recognized by many external agencies, and we have won several awards during this year for the innovation that we have executed in terms of digitalization, in terms of our movement to cloud. And in terms of our application of artificial intelligence and data analytics in all aspects of our business. I will -- now I'll pass on to Biswa, who's our Chief Technology Officer, to talk about the benefits that we expect across all aspects of our business operations and a bit about the challenges of implementing our TDA strategy.

Yes. Thank you, Yuan Siong. And MW, thank you for your question. Let me take the second question first, what are the challenges. As you would appreciate, and you rightly picked up, we have got a well-defined enterprise architecture. And most of our markets, they implement solutions which are aligned to these enterprise architectures. Example, if we have to do a piece of claims around making sure that the customer experience is enhanced in China, we will go into a customer experience platform, which is powered by WeChat. The same thing if you want to accomplish in Thailand, we will go to a platform which is commonly used there, which is Line. So what we do in all cases is although the platforms are different, depending on the choice that we have in those markets, they all follow a standard enterprise architecture, which is at the heart of this transformation. The challenges that we face is really to do with paucity of talent. As you know, in a lot of these markets that we operate in, COVID has accelerated the fight for talent around digital transformation. So crux of our focus is really on making sure that we attract the right people, empower them and make sure that we have the business objectives that we plan to accomplish really fulfilled in a timely manner. The other challenge that we really face is that we're trying to bring people along the journey. As you would understand, a lot of the people that we have in the enterprise are going through this change at a massive scale. So the cultural transformation around it, the change management aspects of it are key to make sure that we take the people along the journey, re-skill them, equip them and make this a big success. In terms of your first question around the benefits, the benefits are really predicated on a few key things. First, we are looking to improve efficiencies, and given our size, the efficiencies that we expect out of this program is significant. Then there is a significant amount of front-end distribution benefits that we see which is related to our sales and distribution parts. And finally, looking at our customer book, which is quite large, as you know, we are looking at significant benefits around persistency that we expect this program to come through and deliver for us.

Thanks, MW. On to the next question, please.

The next question comes from the line of Charles Zhou from Credit Suisse.

This is Charles Zhou from Credit Suisse. And thanks for your video. It's very informative, it's like watching a Netflix documentary. So I have 2 questions here. The first one is collection and usage of data become increasingly important. The personal information protection law of the People's regard with China is effected from November 1 this year, which cupolas the law on personal information processing and also the requirement for close-border information. So we would like to understand the following against such backdrop, for AIA Hong Kong, when AIA Hong Kong provides insurance to the Mainland Chinese visitor or MCV. So what is the scope of the personal information collection? And where is the personal information collected being stored? And what is the usage of the personal information collective? For example, do you use the MCV data to do a pricing for a conversion of the MCV product? And regarding the above-mentioned cross-border financial activities, is there any PRC law that clearly regulates the collection of usage of the MCV data or if there's any legal gap? And are you aware of any [Indiscernible] use on cross-border personal information as stated in the PRC personal information protection law. So this is the first question. The second question, can you -- I mean, so if possible, can you also maybe give us a little more numbers. So what is your current digital and tax budget in U.S. dollar term? And what's your plan for the next 5 years, for example, increase to maybe x percent of your total revenue or maybe profit from current 5%. And for digital development mutations, do use in health engineers? Or do you see outlets and why?

Yes. Thank you. Firstly, I'd like to say that we've been in Asia for more than 100 years. We operate in 18 markets, and we in our operations, we are always compliant with development laws and regulations of each of the markets that we operate in. Now regarding your question about the use of data, specific to MCV customers. I will hand over to Biswa?

Yes. I think we make sure in all the jurisdictions that we operate, we follow the laws of the land. All of our data that we process in any of our jurisdictions, be it China, Hong Kong, Korea or India, really follow the laws of the land and the regulatory provisions that we have. With respect to AIA China, all the data that we process for our Chinese operations reside in China. With respect to customers who basically come for cross-border MCV business in Hong Kong, the data resides in Hong Kong and follows the principles of data regulations of both China as well as Hong Kong. We are looking at the emerging regulations that are there and are fully compliant with the same.

Maybe you can also talk about the budget as well.

On the budget, we are looking to really over the 3-year plan period, looking at investments in the range of USD 1 billion to USD 1.5 billion in that range on top of our existing IT gross operating expense. So that's the bounce that we plan to introduce on top of our existing IT budget for TDA specific spend to accelerate the TDA transmission of the business.

Thanks, Charles. Next question, please.

The next question comes from the line of Thomas Wang from Goldman Sachs.

Thank you management for the opportunity and also the presentation. If I may ask, firstly, a question that's not related to VA, because we have all this technology platform, but the -- if China follows the zero tolerance policy on COVID and the border remains closed, how should we think about the growth outlook for China and Hong Kong next year and maybe try and for next year? So how much we can -- how much the use of this TDA can help? And secondly, if I can ask about Singapore, the government's medical product introduced back in 2015, '16, the Medico integrated issue. Are we integrated our technology initiatives or platform integrated with those government schemes and how we've seen the impact from both the government integrated shoe and our TDA, how that impacted our sales trend, whether it's -- Is there anything positive, negative for each of this TDA and also the government integrated so initiative?

Thank you, Thomas. As you know, we don't give forecast, but I -- on your question about the border opening, I'll hand over to Lance and ZK, if you could take the question on Singapore.

Yes. On the border opening, we're ready for when the border reopens. And as you know, our agents have a split between some that have been historically focused on MCV business and some that are focused on the domestic market. Those that have historically focused on the MCV business, we've been helping to refocus on the domestic market. And I think if you look at our third quarter report that we made the week before last, you'll see that the domestic business has been growing quarter-on-quarter throughout the first 9 months of this year, helped and supported by that shift from the MCV side of the business. So our agents are certainly ready for that, but we can't predict when the border will open or not.

Thank you, I'll take all the questions on the insurance business in Singapore. So as you know, the -- our integrated insurance business is very much a part of the national program. We work very closely with the government. In fact, the whole industry moved very closely with the government. There's many TDA initiatives as well. that's stated by the government. For example, the SG index that's coming, all the insurers in Singapore actually come together to continue to work together to provide this -- the integrated insurance business to take care of all the Singapore and the people living in Singapore. So we do work very closely with the government on all the TDA related initiatives to support the sheet.

Okay. Thanks, Thomas. Next question, please.

The next question comes from the line of Jenny Jiang from Morgan Stanley.

Also, we have very much update probably the first 1 this listing in 10 years' time or they great for us to have additional opportunity to communicate with management. So 2 questions from me. One is I want to ask about the overall progression of our tax adoption. I remember there were a lot of CPI that disclosed at 2020 interim results presentation. There are many of them, so I won't keep it this cloud adoption. There's a lot of app adoption purges might have present in the results. So I just want to how far the whole digital transformation process. Do we have a timeline in terms of when we'll reach the target set sort of almost months ago. The second question is, we're doing a lot of stuff across the market, are we doing all the transformations in-house? Or we're rely on external consultants to help us. Are we trying to build a very big technology division as well from now on to facilitate the transformation and also modernize AI on a basis into sort of the new digital era. Maybe how many tax people or IT people we have in our organization right now.

Thank you, Jenny. You recall back in August last year, we presented our overall new corporate strategy to the market. Our TDA strategy is a cornerstone, central to our the delivery of our strategy. It is 15 months since we presented this strategy to the market. And I must say I'm very pleased with the progress so far. Obviously, we were aided somewhat by the continued pandemic, which are encouraged not just our business units, but our customers, our partners, our agents to quickly shift to a much more digital way of working. Overall, we have been tracking the metrics that we presented to the market, and I'm very pleased with the progress made so far in terms of some of the details. I will pass on to Biswa.

Yes. Thank you, Jenny, for your question. I think your specific question was around cloud adoption. You will be pleased to note that we are now getting into 62% of our overall estate on cloud as of September 2021, which is a pretty high number for the financial services industry in terms of consumption of cloud. On other matrices, like straight-through processing. We have already crossed the 50% mark as well as on the digital side of things, our app ratings usage of the app by the customers, it's kind of picked up quite a bit. The app ratings are all hitting around 4.0 plus as well as we have close to 8 million active users of our platform in terms of daily servicing and our health and wellness vitality needs that are there. Also in terms of -- we had provided that we'll be using data analytics across the board. So I'm very happy to share with you that across the group this year, we have till the month of October executed close to 70 data analytics projects across the insurance value chain, which are all deriving various levels of benefits for the business from cross-selling and upselling to underwriting to claims to risk, to investments across the value chain. Now the second question that you had is how do we do this? We do all this using consultants? We do have internal people? So really, it's a mix and match. We have a balanced mix of in-sourcing and outsourcing. As you would appreciate, some of the best-in-class skills we assemble when we basically see a particular area. Our internal shared services organization, which is quite a sizable organization now in China, has already crossed 2,000 engineers, and the growth that we have seen over the last -- from the time we started the plan, the TDA workforce as a part of our overall workforce today as of October stands at about -- sorry, 15.6% of our workforce. And the number of engineers and the IT people that we have seen an increase is close to 30% in our internal shared services and the business unit, IT teams that we see. So both overall, within the company, in terms of the TDA workforce as a part of the overall population, that's increasing significantly as well as our internal capability on in-sourced people to really take an active role in this transmission that's increasing as well.

And just to actually say something, I think this was said 20 analytics projects -- 70. It's over 100 that we have across the group. And actually in the pack that you can download, you'll see quite a lot of updates in terms of some of the individual businesses in terms of where they are on their journey. Obviously, they're all the different stages. We've given both group targets and each of the business units is progressing towards that.

The next question comes from the line of Andrew Prince from Aton.

Two questions really around Vitality. Firstly, I think you mentioned the worth 1.3 million active customers actually using Vitality. What is that as a percentage of the overall people who've downloaded it? And going on from that, what proportion or goals or platinum customers? And then secondly, could you talk about any thoughts and plans to develop Vitality from a health and wellness app to becoming a wealth platform, so that you can sort of manage people's money as well as their health?

Thank you, Andrew. First of all, I'd like to clarify that Vitality, it's not just a health and wellness app. It's really the crux of our shared value model, whereby through Vitality, we will encourage our customers to make responsible life choices. And as a result, you'll improve the health outcomes and we will share the benefits of these health -- better health outcomes with our customers and resulting in a lower insurance -- cost of insurance for our customers. So it's more than health and wellness app it's more -- it's a shared value insurance model that is quite unique in the Asian markets. I think I will hand over to Stuart to talk about Vitality.

Thank you, Yuan Siong and Andrew, good morning to you. We like to think of Vitality as a way of life and a way to lead a fundamentally more rewarding life. And our view is that it's an essential driver of value creation and as Yuan Siong Lee referenced shared value. In the last 4 years, we've delivered essentially $2 billion of VONB and it now represents in the markets where we operate Vitality, 1/3 of our VONB. As you can appreciate, the pandemic has accentuated demand, magnified and amplified the need for health and wellness solutions. And that's driven tremendous demand from our customers. So our growth of Vitality is 70% year-over-year, and our integration rate to 63%. Referring to the question on engagement. Engagement varies by market. And engagement has consistently improved over time as we become more digitalized, personalized and individualized in connecting with our customers. So globally, if you would look into discoveries engagement rates, they hovered around 40% as do we. And as we continue to enhance the program, we continue to find ways to further connect with our customers and drive high levels of engagement. But the good news is that the engagement that we are driving is quality engagement. The emphasis here is not just to learn about yourself. The emphasis with Vitality is to become a better you. And on that standpoint, based on the clinical as well as the commercial dynamics at play, you'll see that the clinical performance of Vitality indicates that we really are making a difference. We really are making people healthier and enabling healthy outcomes, whether it's body mass or blood glucose or cholesterol or blood pressure across our longitudinal research across the group, which has been in place now for many years, we're seeing consistent strong affirmation of the impact that Vitality is having to drive better clinical biometric outcomes for customers. The next point is on the commercial side, we see lower levels of lapse, high levels of persistency, higher NPS, lower propensity to claim, et cetera, and higher propensity to cross-sell. So we're looking at Vitality as essentially the nerve center of our health and wellness apparatus. And we're trying to find benefits and services and partners that make sense for our customers as we expand into nutrition, mental health, sleep, et cetera. So specifically, your question on wealth, the idea really here is to focus on health, but the extent to which vitality can be further over time, integrated fully into some of our wealth solutions that would be the best sort of outcome, the best harmony between health and wealth. Thank you.

Ken, if you could maybe you'd like to share a bit about how customers are using my AIA in Singapore to help them managed well.

Yes. I mean, in Singapore, the -- our AIA Vitality app is integrated into MyAIA app. So it's a customer app. So for Singapore, it is actually very -- it is a way of doing interacting and engaging with our customers. We use our Vitality to help customers, not just clocking steps, but also promoting mental well-being. So art of physical well-being, but also promote mental well-being. We also talk about eating well and so on and so forth. So it's very much integrated in our customer app, where we use that as 1 app to interact and engage and connect with customers. Yes. I hope my answer helps.

Okay. Okay. Thank you for that. Next question, please.

The next question comes from the line of Kailesh Mistry from HSBC.

First one is what metrics should we monitor to gauge success of AIA's TDA initiatives. And will you commit to providing these consistently to the market? Second question is around sort of the technology talent and budget. So just wanted to understand the 1 billion to 1.5 billion, was that for the next 3 years? Or is that 3 years from when Yuan Siong made the announcement last August. And how does the Xiao Bang relationship fit into all of this? What is the size of the Xiao Bang part of the technology relationship versus what you've got elsewhere? And is that relationship exclusive to AIA. And anything you can say around total investment within that partnership?

Okay. I'll hand these questions to Biswa.

Yes. I think that -- let me take first the incremental investment question that you put, 1.0 billion to 1.5 billion. We announced the ambitious Ascent TDA strategy last year, June of...

August.

August of 2020. So for the 3-year plan period from August 2020 till July 2023, that's where the 3 years we plan to spend 1.5 billion -- 1.0 billion to 1.5 billion on top of our existing IT expenses that are there. That's the answer to your first question. What matrices that we track, I think we are regularly providing the updates on those matrices. You'll see them coming through our annual results as well as the media wherein matrices such as percentage of cloud adoption, percentage of straight-through processing, the number of consumers and our platforms in terms of the customer apps that Ken touched upon in terms of our analytics, deepening of expertise that's there. And over a period of time, you will see them getting reflected in other events like today's events, the progress that we make. In terms of the Xiao Bang relationship, we are very happy with the relationship that we have. This is more a test and learn. It's not something that we like to talk about extensively at this point in time in this presentation, but it's fair to say that it's a small part of that investment that you're looking at. It is not the investment that is there. And what we are doing with using Xiao Bang technology, is really trying to test and learn wide-sized products. How do we basically get into digital affinity partners and really experiment the next stage of evolution for us in terms of trying to deep sell and get connected with customers.

I think I'd also like to supplement that in terms of technology service providers Xiao Bang is just one of them, and we have a host of high-quality service providers or technology partners that we work with in all our markets that provide us with the best technology that we can leverage on and implement into all aspects of our businesses.

Okay. Thanks, Kailesh, for your questions. And next question, please.

Can I just...

Sorry yes, carry on.

Yes. Just a quick one. Thank you for the statistics on cloud adoption. What is it in Hong Kong? And secondly, is there a diversification of cloud providers by market or just a little bit more color on that.

Let me take that, Kailesh. I think -- we follow multiple cloud providers. We actually host our estate and technology landscape on multiple providers. At this point in time, there are 3 providers that we use. Specific to Hong Kong, I think your question is in terms of percentage adoption. It is in the excess of the group average that I provided to you, which was 62 to Hong Kong is north of 62 million.

Okay. Is that okay, Kailesh?

Yes.

Okay. Next question, please.

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Leon Qi from Daiwa Capital.

This is Leon Qi from Daiwa. I appreciate the very impressive presentation and congratulations on the remarkable progress on TDA since announced in August last year. I have 3 areas that I want to explore with management if possible. Firstly, regarding China, I just want to understand, that compared with some of your competitors doing so-called open paper model, would you adopt that model and from a technology perspective, would you allow, for example, open APIs from other service vendors into your own flagship app? And also in China on the partnership side just want to understand, are we trying to open our apps to banks by in bancassurance cooperation with us. And just now in Korea, I think you would have mentioned the SK Telecom collaboration. Is it too difficult in China to do that kind of cooperation with the major telecom operators in terms of doing dynamic pricing from the data that telecom providers have. So just to repeat a few questions for China. And secondly on the regulation side for personal data, I guess, it's either for Biswa or Fisher. Could you confirm that currently, if we have any IT architecture that is specific to PRC-based decline in terms of storing their personal data as required by the Mainland Chinese regulators. So I just wanted to get a clarification on that part on personal data. And last question, I think over the longer term, I think this is a strategy one. Are we considering like doing technology exports to earn the export [indiscernible] So would you be worrying about any cannibalization to our existing business? Or is it something knowing our strategy.

Okay. Thank you, Leon, for your many questions, not just 3. Right. First of all, I think I'd like to invite Fisher to talk about 1 experience and also to handle the question about digital platform partners in China and his thinking around that. And then I think the data question, Biswa can take because he's talked about it just now. longer -- and on the third question about exporting technology, as I've explained to the market before. We are 100% focused on Asia. We are very much focused on health, life and health insurance, which we believe we are very good at that where makes our strength and we are not -- there's no intention on our part to become a technology company. So Fisher over to you on the 1 experience and the ship platforms.

Actually, thanks for the question. Actually, the question is also answered about the cooperation with banks. I also to emphasize that we have built a strong digital capability and also the digital cooperation with the banks, especially with exclusive banks like a city. We have built an end-to-end online business and also use digitized teams to help their RM to improve their activity. So this is for band -- We also have many cooperation with a different digital player and also social media player. As you can see from the video, we have generated more than 500,000 leads in the first half. But honestly, there is still much room to improve the efficiency of the conversion ratio, because in the past we were lack of powerful nurturing and engagement tools. I think there is a major reason why we are determined to develop the so-called One Experience. One Experience, as I introduced in the video, it's a digital data-driven integrated customer platform, we can use many things to nurturing the prospect convert the prospect from the coleads to the warm leads, to their hot leads. And all these interactions will be converted into the data and generate the data inside and base, we will be seamlessly integrated into the agency digital platform. So with these One Experience, we will be able to connect with different digital player and also the social media platform we can convert the leads in a more meaningful way and at scale. So this is for the One Experience. I think that this has generate a leader very solid foundation for our future cooperation with digital banks of digital player.

Before Biswa goes and tackle the question on data. Maybe I'd like to invite also Naveen because in India, we actually work with a lot of open architecture banks and digital platforms. And I think we have done quite well in that regard, Naveen?

Thank you. Thank you, Yuan Siong. So as you rightly said, in India, the market has evolved to be largely open architecture with large partners. We work with 5 banks, most of them in open architecture, but also with more than 150 brokers all again in open architecture. And more recently, we have signed up some of the new emerging digital players, such as Practo, such as PhonePe, which is a large payments player, System, which is a large digital wealth management player with the exception of Practo, again, all of these are on open architecture. So I think what we've been able to do is, over the last 1 year, if you look at our trajectory, in each and every 1 of these partners by and large, very large number of partners. We've been able to increase our market share and wallet share significantly. This includes some of the very sophisticated digital and tele players like Policybazaar, which are today operating in open architecture across a large number of players. I think what has helped us there is the foundation of TDA which Biswa and Yuan Siong already touched upon. So I will not repeat everything, but the one thing I will just highlight is we've been able to work with our partners to leverage analytics in particular, for improving consumer experience in a very significant manner. Just one example of that is today, we have a flagship product, which is a protection product on a unit-linked platform. And as we speak right now, for the next 3 months working with our partners, we have identified more than 1 million offers, more than 1 million offers that will be rolled out to the customers, where the underwriting is already done, both financial as well as medical underwriting is already done on the back of data that we have got from our partners and our own data. And as we speak, about 200,000 of these offers are already rolled out and under conversion. So this, coupled with making the process of purchase as easy and seamless as possible through integration of KYC through integration with national utilities like the tax authority through integration with all kinds of payment options as well as integration for video verification, I think that has been the contributor to our success in open architecture with all kinds of partners, whether banks, whether brokers, whether new edge partners. Thank you, Yuan Siong. Back to you.

On the data?

On data. Yes. No, I think as I said in the beginning, Leon, we respect the data privacy of our customers in all cases. And fundamentally, we are compliant to the laws of the land wherever we operate. So obviously, for PIPL and all of the emerging regulations that are there, we have cross-functional teams which are set up within the company, which work within the guidelines and the data privacy and data hosting and sovereignty aspects that we see. And I just want to make sure that I assure you that we are compliant to all existing policies and very closely tied with emerging policies to make sure that everything that we do is in line and compliant with the policies of the markets that we operate in.

Okay. That's enough we have run out of time. So thanks, everybody, for listening and particularly thank you for your questions. And obviously, if you have any follow-ups, then please come through to us at Investor Relations. So thanks very much, and good evening from Hong Kong.