RMB 100 Billion in Premiums, "Zero" Agents: China Post Life Begins to Reshelf Products

In the first half of 2026, China Post Life recorded insurance business income of RMB 129.138 billion and a net profit of RMB 7.068 billion. Of this, the net profit for the second quarter alone was RMB 5.822 billion, contributing more than 80% of the total profit for the first half.

Beyond performance figures, newly disclosed data offers another perspective.

Starting this year, the number of individual agents has been included in the scope of solvency report disclosures for the first time:

As of the end of the second quarter, China Post Life’s solvency report disclosed zero individual agents. During the same period, the company’s written premiums reached RMB 130.346 billion, with contribution rates from bancassurance, other channels, and group insurance at 97.41%, 1.56%, and 1.03%, respectively.

This means that, by largely abandoning the individual insurance channel, China Post Life completed over RMB 100 billion in semi-annual written premiums relying on postal and bank outlets.

The latest change lies in the products being placed on the main shelves of postal and bank outlets.

In the first quarter of this year, China Post Life’s long-term participating insurance premiums increased by 83% year-on-year, with participating insurance contributing over 40% to the new business value. In the first half of the year, two participating whole life insurance products entered the company’s top five best-selling products, with combined written premiums approaching RMB 20 billion.

This indicates that China Post Life’s participating insurance has moved from product reserves to scale sales.

The postal and banking network has long excelled in broad reach, standardized sales, and traditional savings-type insurance. However, participating insurance requires explaining guaranteed benefits, non-guaranteed dividends, and investment performance, imposing higher demands on product explanation, customer service, and asset management.

China Post Life has already demonstrated the scale sales capability of the postal and banking network. What remains to be verified is whether this system, operating through nearly 40,000 outlets, can develop the complex product management capabilities matching participating insurance.

Shelf Adjustment

China Post Life’s bancassurance business mainly relies on the China Post and PSBC systems.

In 2025, the company’s new single premiums from bancassurance were approximately RMB 40.27 billion, with the main postal and banking channel contributing about 93%. Behind this channel are PSBC’s nearly 40,000 business outlets and over 680 million individual customers.

Postal and bank outlets are responsible for reaching customers and embedding insurance sales into scenarios such as savings maturity and wealth allocation. China Post Life provides training and business support to these outlets through lecturers, insurance planners, and a “self-operated + managed” mechanism.

By the end of 2025, China Post Life had 309 full-time lecturers and 6,893 part-time lecturers, conducting approximately 11,000 training sessions throughout the year.

Broad coverage and multiple layers mean that the postal and banking channel relies more heavily on standardized replication;

The easier a product is to understand and the more it allows for unified sales scripts, the easier it is to roll out at grassroots outlets. Traditional whole life insurance and annuities with relatively clear guaranteed benefits fit this sales logic better.

Participating insurance raises the sales threshold.

When customer returns consist of both guaranteed benefits and non-guaranteed dividends, the product can no longer be summarized by a fixed interest rate. Outlets must not only explain where dividends come from and why actual returns fluctuate but also clarify the difference between demonstrated returns and final payouts.

Hub learned that in the past two years, some banks were once quite cautious about single-premium and participating whole life products. As assumed interest rates continued to decline and the relative attractiveness of traditional insurance weakened, participating insurance gradually entered more bank shelves.

However, listing is only the first step.

A bancassurance professional told Hub that selling participating insurance is essentially selling an insurer’s long-term investment capability. Their bank has already required the insurer’s investment and actuarial departments to participate in product roadshows, explaining to outlets the historical performance, asset allocation, and risk control logic of the participating account.

For China Post Life, nearly 7,000 part-time lecturers must not only convey product terms but also translate dividend mechanisms, investment logic, and risk boundaries into sales language that grassroots outlets can accurately use.

From the product side, China Post Life has continuously increased the supply of participating insurance.

In 2025, the company’s new regular premiums for long-term participating insurance reached RMB 15.204 billion, with total participating insurance premium income for the year reaching RMB 42 billion, a 58% year-on-year increase. Among the 53 new products filed that year, 28 were participating products;

It was not until the first quarter of 2026 that participating insurance entered China Post Life’s top five best-selling products. In the first half of the year, two participating whole life insurance products had combined written premiums approaching RMB 20 billion.

This indicates that China Post Life is still in a transition phase where traditional insurance supports scale while participating insurance increases value contribution. However, participating insurance has crossed the stage of product reserves and small-scale trial sales, beginning to achieve scale.

Product switching is also influenced by internal assessment mechanisms. Hub learned that some insurers have adjusted the assessment weights of traditional and participating insurance to reduce the inertia of the sales end continuing to favor products with higher short-term indicators.

China Post Life did not disclose specific assessment methods, but since participating insurance’s contribution to new business value has exceeded 40%, it shows that product switching has extended from sales scale to value structure.

New Policies Await Verification

The shelves have been adjusted, but the quality of this batch of new participating insurance policies cannot be judged solely by current sales volume.

In 2025, China Post Life’s renewal premiums exceeded RMB 100 billion for the first time, accounting for 73% of total premiums. In the first half of 2026, renewal written premiums reached RMB 96.736 billion, accounting for 74.2% of total written premiums.

During the same period, the company’s 13-month policy persistence rate was 95.77%, the comprehensive surrender rate for the first half was 1.40%, and the comprehensive surrender rate for the second quarter further dropped to 0.60%.

These indicators do not yet show significant pressure.

However, in the participating insurance market, dividend levels falling short of sales expectations, insufficient customer understanding of non-guaranteed returns, and the resulting surrenders and complaints have become important dimensions for evaluating the quality of new policies.

China Post Life’s comprehensive surrender rate of 1.40% in the first half at least indicates that the overall existing business remains relatively stable. However, judging from the timing of the surge in participating insurance, current renewal premiums, persistence rates, and surrender rates are not yet sufficient to fully reflect the quality of the new policies issued since 2025.

Most of these policies are still in the early stages and have not yet fully experienced subsequent premium payments and multiple dividend announcements;

Sales volume can be formed within a quarter, but whether customers fully understand non-guaranteed benefits, whether actual returns are close to sales expectations, and whether outlets can provide continuous service will take several years to verify.

The bancassurance channel amplifies this lag. Bank outlets can reach a large number of customers in a short period, but issues not fully explained during sales often only emerge during renewal payments, dividend announcements, or when customers reassess their returns.

In addition to the policies themselves requiring time for verification, the method of scaling up participating insurance is also changing.

The “integration of reporting and banking practices” in bancassurance, implemented since 2023, has compressed the space for insurers to drive outlet sales through expenses.

In 2024, China Post Life paid fees and commissions of RMB 5.163 billion to PSBC. In 2025, the related fees paid to PSBC and China Post Group decreased to a total of RMB 3.725 billion.

As expense management in the bancassurance channel becomes more refined, regulatory constraints in 2026 have begun to extend from bank commissions to expenditures for bancassurance specialist incentives, training, and customer service, further narrowing the space for additional sales investment through other expense items.

This has a more direct impact on participating insurance: on one hand, participating insurance relies more on outlet training, return explanations, and follow-up services; on the other hand, the cap on demonstrated interest rates has been lowered from 3.9% to 3.5%, reducing the space to enhance customer attraction through higher demonstrated returns.

Several relationship managers at outlets of state-owned large banks and joint-stock banks told Hub that insurance sales remain one of the assessment tasks for some outlets, with participating insurance as the main promoted product. However, after stricter regulation of channel expenses, some related sales incentives have been reduced, leading to a decline in the sales enthusiasm of relationship managers.

Decreasing expenses help improve new business value but also recalculate the input-output ratio for outlets selling complex products.

When extra incentives no longer constitute the main driving force, whether participating insurance can continue to be the main promoted product at outlets will depend more on product returns, customer retention, and continuous service. Data with true judgment significance will only appear after more policies enter their second and third policy years.

Dividends Handed to the Asset Side

Whether new policies will stay ultimately depends on whether the asset side can deliver floating returns.

Participating insurance reduces guaranteed benefits written into contracts, linking more customer returns to the insurer’s operational results. For insurers, this helps lower rigid liability costs. Correspondingly, the investment side needs to consistently create returns over a longer cycle and convert a portion of them into distributable dividends.

This makes the operational results of participating insurance exhibit significant time lag: sales occur in the current period, but investment realization and customer evaluation may span multiple market cycles.

Hub learned that if the product term and customers’ actual holding time are compressed to around five years, it may be difficult to cover a complete market cycle. Once the capital market remains sluggish, the participating account may struggle to accumulate sufficient excess returns, putting pressure on actual dividends.

The investment data currently disclosed by China Post Life is only a phased performance in this long-term process.

In the first half of 2026, the company’s investment yield was 2.33%, and the comprehensive investment yield was 2.89%. For participating insurance, the key is not the book return of a certain phase, but whether the returns can be sustained stably and eventually enter dividend distribution.

Regulators are also strengthening the link between investment performance and dividend levels.

According to relevant requirements, if the investment yield corresponding to the proposed dividend level is higher than the lower of the financial investment yield and comprehensive investment yield of the participating account over the past three years, the insurer needs to provide additional justification and submit it to the Asset-Liability Management Committee for review.

This means that how much the participating account has earned in the past is increasingly directly constraining how much can be distributed in the future.

Increasing the proportion of participating insurance helps reduce long-term rigid guarantee costs, but the repair of China Post Life’s solvency indicators in the second quarter cannot be simply viewed as an immediate result of product transformation.

As of the end of the second quarter, the company’s minimum capital decreased from RMB 47.794 billion to RMB 45.779 billion, while actual capital increased from RMB 61.991 billion to RMB 70.035 billion. This set of changes is simultaneously influenced by factors such as future surplus from new policies, bond valuations, equity investment performance, and changes in the interest rate curve.

The company expects that actual capital may fall back to RMB 65.788 billion in the next quarter, and the core solvency adequacy ratio may drop to 101.71%. The impact of product structure adjustment on the capital side still requires longer-term verification.

Observing this batch of new participating insurance policies should not focus solely on the dividend realization rate.

Guaranteed benefits and demonstration bases differ across products. After the reduction in demonstrated interest rates, even if the actual distributed dividends do not increase, the dividend realization rate may passively rise due to the lower comparison base.

More meaningful for judgment is whether the combination of guaranteed benefits and actual dividends can form competitive long-term returns for customers while keeping the company’s liability costs within a bearable range.

The postal and banking channel has already proven its ability to expand premium scale.

Premiums exceeding RMB 100 billion measure sales capability; the long-term returns formed by guaranteed benefits and actual dividends test China Post Life’s ability to manage complex products.

This determines the ultimate quality of this “reshelving.”

Market risks exist; investment requires caution. This article does not constitute personal investment advice, nor does it consider the specific investment goals, financial status, or needs of individual users. Users should consider whether any opinions, views, or conclusions in this article align with their specific circumstances. Responsibility for investments made based on this lies with the investor.