The 2020 national college entrance exam in China was organized under extremely special circumstances. Affected by the pandemic, the national college entrance exam was postponed by one month. Candidates across the country have experienced six months of study at home. When the college entrance exam was approaching, those candidates were also affected by adverse factors such as epidemic resurgences and extreme weather. Therefore, compared with previous years, the candidates and their families paid more attention to the admission policy, college application and other related information during the admission period.

From the perspective of customers, the Department of Financial Service of China Post Group Co., Ltd. captured in advance the special needs from families with college entrance exam candidates, and then organized an online college entrance exam consultation meeting with invited well-known experts to hold online lectures. The experts helped to explain and analyze related questions on college application and prospects of specific university majors, which attracted more than 192,000 viewers online and received wide attention and high praise in the meanwhile. Since the parents of those college entrance exam candidates are generally between 45 and 50 years old and they are at the peak of their financial status in their life cycle, the successful holding of this event not only demonstrates China Post’s responsibility as a central government enterprise to serve the society, but also helps to reserve middle and high-end customer base for the transformation of agent financial service and the achievement of high-quality development.

Basing on the customer perspective and strengthening technology empowerment have been the key task of this year for the Department of Financial Service to implement the spirit of the Group’s work conference and address the impact of the pandemic. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 in February, the traditional development of agent financial service has suffered a huge blow. Physical outlets had to temporarily suspend all operations on a large scale, and the closed-off community management prevented traditional customer acquisition work such as cold visits. The offline customer acquisition and business development were greatly undermined, which led to a relatively large negative growth in the intermediary business of agent finance, insurance and wealth management in the first quarter, with 62.2% in agent insurance premiums in February, a drop of 53% of the revenue (1.44 billion yuan, about 200 million US dollars year on year), resulting in 4.8 percent year-on-year negative growth of the overall revenue of agent financial service.

In order to reverse the unfavorable situation as soon as possible, the Department of Financial Service changed its development approaches with quick response, adjusted its work arrangement, accelerated the transformation of its role from a functional department to an operating department, and established a rapid market response mechanism. In order to meet the needs of customers for online financial services, the department accordingly adjusted its development strategy in time to the online platforms, planned and organized several online product promotional campaigns. During the period, a total of 14 online livestreaming promotional campaigns were hosted by well-known experts, which attracted more than 10,000 customers each time with an average premium income of over 100 million yuan (about US$14.63 million). This new strategy helped the company to top the rank in this industry in terms of initial premium and income, making it to be the best pioneering practice in the industry.  　

After the success of the practice, the Department of Financial Service summed up the experience and applied it to fully explore and respond to market opportunities. In response to hotspots of the market such as the securities market at the end of the first quarter, the stimulated demand for insurance protection by the pandemic, and the active trading of equity products under flexible and appropriate monetary policies, the department has successively planned activities like free online anti-epidemic insurance, online national college entrance exam consultation meetings, and cloud investment strategy meetings. These activities have provided services to more than one million online customers, and therefore acquired massive customer resources and data information. The combination of online and offline activities has effectively promoted business transformation in times of the epidemic prevention and control period, and successfully created a batch of best practice cases in the industry. As of the end of July, the income of agent insurance business increased by 11% year-on-year, and the sales of non-monetary funds increased nearly 4 times, which explored a new path and laid a solid foundation for the sustainable development of postal agent financial service during the period of national regular epidemic prevention and control.