Dai-ichi Life

The Dai-ichi Life Group provides life insurance and pension products to customers in Japan and the wider APAC region. Founded in Japan in 1902, Dai-Ichi Life has expanded into other territories mostly through acquisition or partnership to offer life insurance, including Australia, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Headquartered in Tokyo, Dai-ichi is Japan's 3rd largest insurer by revenue and employs over 48,000 people worldwide.

Dai-ichi Life Group focuses heavily on global innovation. It has innovation labs in Silicon Valley and London, as well as additional sites in Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East; outputs of the Innovation Lab have included a dementia prevention app developed with US startup Neurotrack.. Its innovation unit has invested in several startups through its CVC, including CureApp, and it has also established the Dai-ichi Life Innovation fund (DLIF) for internal use. In addition to this, it works with a number of accelerators, academic institutions, and VC partners, including Plug & Play, Founders Factory, and Khosla Ventures.

In addition to incubation programs, Dai-ichi has run several innovation competitions exploring various themes around life insurance, health promotion and technology enhancements. Partners for these programs have included corporate innovation consultants Agorize and Tenity, as well as Japan Post Life and NTT DATA.

Through these programs, Dai-ichi focuses on enhances the customer experience for their life insurance policyholders with access to telemedicine and advanced medical care, as well as better preventive medicine. Internally, Dai-ichi has sought to digitise its business, with a target of reducing paper document usage by 85% by 2022, and of improving productivity through increased automation.

In July 2022 Dai-ichi Life announced it was to invest approximately £75m in YuLife Holdings, a UK-based group life insurance company. On top of the investment, Dai-ichi will also help YuLife further enhance its business, through developing new life insurance products and services.

In August 2022 Democrance announced it was partnering Dai-ichi Life Cambodia to launch their first digital life insurance product. Democrance has developed a SaaS platform with automated processes, enabling Dai-Ichi Life to design an affordable term life product which has a fully digital customer journey and offers immediate protection.

That same month, Dai-ichi Life acquired New Zealand-based insurer Partners Life for almost NZ$1bn.

In April 2023 Dai-ichi Life Holdings announced that Stephen Barnham was joining the company as Chief Information Officer and Chief Digital Officer, to help lead the company's digital transformation strategies.

In July 2023, Dai0ichi Life Holdings announced it had invested INR 3.1bn in RenewBuy, an Indian insurtech. Through this investment, the company stated it would make further efforts to enhance its businesses by strengthening and supporting its JV, Star Union Dai-ichi Life, by leveraging the distribution capacity of RenewBuy as well as by expanding RenewBuy’s technologies and capabilities into the Group’s business.

In October 2023, Dai-ichi and YuLife launched a joint pilot of YuLife's Wellbeing Model in Japan.