Chinese Bankers Hail Potential of Fintech to Transform Business Practices

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Leading members of China’s banking sector have extolled fintech’s transformative potential at the recent “2018 China Fintech Development Forum” (2018中国金融科技发展论坛).

“Finance is a crucial environment for all of society, and currently faces a shift from services methods to services systems” said Shen Rujun (沈如君), vice-head of the Bank of Communications, according a report from Xinhua.

According to Shen the integration of traditional finance with technology encompasses three stages – financial informatization, online finance and fintech.

“The financial sector has generally passéd through the financial informatization and online finance stage, while fintech is penetrating various areas of financial activity via emerging technologies, and achieving innovation in terms of sales methods, services systems, risk control and prevention and daily operations.

“This can bring about new business models, operating procedures and products, and thus have a major impact upon methods for the provision of financial services.”

Yu Hongyong (余红永), consumer finance manager at China Post, said that traditional banking is accustomed to on-site inspections as the basis for credit extension, for which risk control costs are high, and which cannot effectively satisfy the needs of a large-volume of diffuse, small-scale customers.

“Fintech is in accordance with the trend of consumer upgrade, and mutually reinforces the development of traditional banking.

“Not only can this reduce the service costs of consumer finance and raise service efficiency, more importantly it can cover the long-tail of clients that traditional financial institutions are unable to satisfy, such as the financial needs of blue-collar workers and university students.”

Ding Xiaoping (丁晓平), vice general manager of the digital banking department of the Bank of Nanjing, said that fintech companies, internet companies and the banking sector were already engaging in in-depth strategic cooperation.

Bank of Nanjing is already cooperating with China’s four internet giants of Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com when it comes to platforms and technologies, as well as pursuing in-depth cooperations hen it comes to online operations.

Sun Xionghong (孙雄鹏), vice-head of Industrial Bank Co. said that the lender had established a data analysis laboratory, an artificial intelligence laboratory as well as a blockchain team, and fully applied new technologies including cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence to credit and risk assessment, targeted sales, investment and wealth management and internal compliance controls.

“In the first half of the year we executed a strategic cooperative agreement with Microsoft for artificial intelligence and the financial cloud, and in addition to this we maintain excellent cooperative relations with leading tech firms such as Tencent and Alibaba.”