ZhongAn Insurance Data Platform: Digital Transformation, 4633 Framework, and Real‑time Data Warehouse with StarRocks

ZhongAn Insurance, a fast‑growing internet‑focused insurer, achieved 200 billion CNY premium in 2021 and relies heavily on data, with engineers comprising about 50% of its staff.

The company’s digital framework, called 4633, consists of four layers—Application, Algorithm, Platform, and Guarantee—emphasizing business value over pure performance and guiding data‑driven initiatives such as incremental growth, loss reduction, and market expansion.

The JiZhi data platform implements this framework by integrating data processing, machine learning, and governance into a unified pipeline, supporting both internal analytics and external marketing systems while providing fine‑grained, real‑time data access for various stakeholders.

Initially, the real‑time warehouse relied on ClickHouse for both offline and streaming workloads, but increasing concurrent queries, multi‑table joins, and operational overhead (ZooKeeper dependency, lack of automatic resharding, limited DML support) caused severe performance degradation.

To address these issues, ZhongAn migrated to StarRocks, which offers superior multi‑table join performance, better concurrency handling, and simpler operational management, achieving 3‑5× speedups in Flink‑on‑StarRocks pipelines and comparable single‑table performance to ClickHouse.

The platform’s core modules focus on answering three questions: what happened (fine‑grained, second‑level visualizations), why it happened (attribution analysis across metrics), and what will happen (predictive modeling for proactive decision‑making).

Data synchronization components enable rapid ingestion from external sources (e.g., Douyin, Kuaishou, Baidu, Tencent) and internal systems, feeding a unified OLAP engine that abstracts technical complexity for analysts, marketers, and risk teams.

In advertising scenarios, the end‑to‑end data flow spans multiple touchpoints, and the real‑time capabilities of StarRocks allow sub‑10‑second query responses, dramatically improving operational agility.

Overall, ZhongAn’s data team demonstrates how a well‑designed, scalable data platform can accelerate digital transformation, enhance business insight, and support innovative insurance products.