(Yicai Global) Oct. 27 -- Shanghai is striving to become an international center of insurance business that targets insurers through fresh policy support and a new reinsurance platform.

The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission and the eastern city's municipal government issued a guideline during the third Lujiazui International Reinsurance Conference yesterday to support Shanghai in its goal of turning into an increasingly important reinsurance hub.

Shanghai should attract more reinsurers, including foreign ones, to set up institutions in the city. The guideline proposed for the first time that the conference will be used to create a centralized trading scenario for reinsurance business, promoting dealmaking and international cooperation.

For the first time, the government expressed its support for establishing insurance branches in the free trade zone. The municipality could pilot cross-border reinsurance business in the Lingang Special Area of China Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone, benchmarked against mature international markets. Moreover, it said that the Shanghai Shipping Insurance Center should explore reinsurance business.

The financial district of Lujiazui has so far been the city's insurance capital. Some 70 percent of all insurance institutions in Shanghai are based in Lujiazui. The same ratio goes for insurance asset management institutions. All the eight reinsurance institutions in Shanghai are concentrated in the area.

A new platform was revealed at the event. The Shanghai Insurance Exchange released a digital reinsurance registration and settlement platform which is expected to become key in the city's development goals.

The new platform makes use of the exchange’s self-developed blockchain technology to provide various services including account clearing, data interaction, deal registration, contract deposit, and fund settlement for reinsurance transactions without changing the existing modes and processes, said Ren Chunsheng, chairman of the SHIE.

The platform provides support free from geographical restrictions and should help Shanghai to become a central node of the internal cycle and a strategic link of the double cycle of reinsurance data flow, information flow, and capital flow, Ren concluded.

Editor: Tang Shihua, Emmi Laine, Xiao Yi