A senior official from the Chinese central bank has called for local governments to work with Beijing to step up scrutiny of the burgeoning fintech sector.
Sun Guofeng, head of the People’s Bank of China’s research department, said at the BUND Summit on Fintech over the weekend that local regulators needed to engage in closer cooperation with the central government in order to better tackle risk in relation to fintech and associated cross-regional online lending.
“Building regulatory regimes at the local level will become one of the key tasks in the future for reining in financial risk,” said Sun according to state-owned press.
“Regulators at local levels should adopt new technology such as cloud computing to enhance capabilities in protecting against and resolving cross-market financial risk.”
Beijing’s determination to tackle fintech-related risk is best evidenced by its crackdown on the online lending sector, with data from Online Lending House indicating that only 1,800 of more than 6000 platforms launched in China were still in operation as of the end of June.
