China's online insurance sales surge in 2015

BEIJING - With more Chinese managing their wealth online, insurance policies sold via the Internet more than doubled in China last year.

The combined premiums of insurance policies sold online totaled 223.4 billion yuan ($32.5 billion) in 2015, jumping 160 percent from 2014, said an industry report released Sunday by the Insurance Association of China.

Breakdown figures showed that life insurance premiums and property insurance premiums reached 146.6 billion yuan and 76.8 billion yuan last year, respectively. By the end of 2015, 110 insurers were selling policies online in China, with the premiums collected by the ten largest insurers topping 172.5 billion yuan, accounting for about 77.3 percent of the total, noted the report.

Online insurance has been expanding quickly and played an increasingly important role in the industry in recent years, Zhu Jinyuan, head of the association, said at an event for the release of the report.

"However, not enough efforts have been made to innovate online sales business models. Industry rules need to be improved and risk prevention needs to be strengthened," Zhu said.