Redefining Insurance Agents with APEX (AI-driven Professional Empowerment eXperience) Qorus-NTT DATA Innovation in Insurance Awards 2026

Cathay Life Insurance has been established for over 60 years, with tied agents as its primary distribution channel. By the end of 2025, the agent channel reached 23,277 full-time agents—the largest in Taiwan—and agents contributed more than 75% of the company’s premium income. Over the past decade, Cathay Life’s full-time agents have undergone three key transformation stages:

1. Digital Agent (10 years ago): Transition from paper-based and manual operations to workflow automation and mobility.

2. Remote Agent (5 years ago): In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, developed digital remote services to overcome time and geographic limitations.

3. AI Agent (Now): Leveraging digital advantages and AI empowerment to deliver seamless, precise, and “hyper-personalized” services.

Cathay Life developed APEX (AI-driven Professional Empowerment eXperience) as a solution to drive end-to-end sales transformation. Centered on “Human + AI,” APEX embeds AI deeply into the agent journey—including lead and relationship management, sales drills, inspiration, needs analysis, and product recommendation. By empowering agents with digital and AI tools, APEX enables seamless and precise insurance sales, enhances efficiency, and creates a new model of human–AI collaboration that redefines customer experience and sets a benchmark for digital transformation and AI application in insurance.

Facing IFRS adoption in 2026, Taiwanese insurers must focus on boosting sales of protection-oriented products that contribute more significantly to CSM. However, these products are complex and difficult for customers to understand, creating communication challenges between agents and customers. In addition, Taiwan’s insurance market is mature, with penetration and density among the highest globally. Combined with demographic shifts from declining birth rates, the new customer market is shrinking. Competitive advantage has shifted from product-driven to service-driven. Thus, leveraging digital and AI technologies to help agents deliver more complete and convenient sales services has become a critical priority.

Unlike peers who provide single-scenario or partially integrated digital applications (e.g., mobile insurance), Cathay Life uses APEX to drive full-scenario sales transformation. APEX connects the four major stages of the agent journey—lead & relationship management, sales drills, inspiration, and needs analysis & product recommendation—empowering agents to deliver customer-centric services, strengthen trust, and achieve hyper-personalized precision marketing.

【APEX Core Modules】

1. Lead & Relationship Management: Integrate customer data in a customer-centric way to support agent to manage the relationship with customers. AI-driven tagging predicts product purchase potential and highlights life events (e.g., marriage, childbirth, retirement), enabling agents to identify opportunities and generate sales leads.

2. Sales Drill: Generative AI provides interactive simulations to strengthen sales skills. Agents define scenarios and customer profiles, conduct real-time voice-based drills, and receive immediate feedback and scoring to improve communication and objection handling.

3. Inspiration: Integration of Cathay’s life, non-life, banking, securities, and health resources into a unified marketing platform. Machine learning and generative AI recommend the most relevant materials to sustain customer engagement and meet diverse needs.

4.Needs Analysis & Product Recommendation:

(1) What’s Covered & Missing:
A. Savings and investment product: “Asset Dashboard” consolidates existing policies for intuitive visualization of asset allocation and cash flow.

B. Protection products: “Visualized Protection Framework” presents coverage status and gaps across eight categories. Generative AI develops an “AI Protection Assistant” to calculate gaps and generate easy-to-understand recommendations.

(2) What’s Needed:

Machine learning-based product recommendation model considers gaps, life stage, preferences, and budget to generate personalized solutions.

In addition, Cathay Life Insurance leverages generative AI technology for policy recognition, enabling agents to quickly identify products and coverage purchased by customers from other insurance companies and integrate them into the customer database. This enhances the accuracy of asset dashboards and the numerical precision of visualized protection frameworks.

APEX involves digital tool planning, AI model development, and agent execution, with collaboration across six departments and over 700 employees, applied to more than 23,000 agents.

【2025 Achievements】

1. Usage: Monthly agent usage reached 100% throughout the year, with satisfaction at 9.45/10.

2. Customer Satisfaction: R-NPS reached 40.8 in 2025, a 146% increase from 2020.

3. Sales Efficiency: Agents highly engaged with APEX closed deals in 12.3 days on average, 5.5 days faster than less-engaged peers.

4. Premium Growth: First-year premiums from the tied agent channel reached USD 44.45 billion in 2025, a 30% increase from 2024.

Cathay Life demonstrates strong digital innovation capabilities. In 2025, it received multiple international awards including the Celent Model Insurer Award, ITC Asia Insurer Awards, and Qorus Innovation Insurance Award, as well as Taiwan’s highest industry honor, the Insurance Excellence Award. Cathay Life will continue to use innovation as its growth engine, guiding agents to meet customer needs more precisely and intelligently, and realizing a new generation of customer-centric insurance.