The founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba says that the emergence of new forms of fintech will result in profound changes to the way that financial institutions address the issue of risk.
Speaking at the 2018 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (2018世界人工智能大会) held in Shanghai on 17 September, Jack Ma said that the core competence for financial institutions would always be risk control.
“In the era of data, financial risk control doesn’t provide banks with a bullet-proof jacket, but means using data technology to forecast risk,” said Ma in a keynote speech for the event. “The removal of risk isn’t catching bad people, but uncovering and forecasting bad events.”
“This marks a fundamental change in risk mentality – this is how new forms of finance can bring benefit to even more people in the future.
“IT has brought benefit to 20% of people, but data technology in the AI era will bring benefit to 80% of people. This is where huge opportunities lie in future for the world.”
Ma further said at the event that internet finance means more than just using the internet to provide finance services, but also entailed the use of the latest technologies to improve service provision.
“Today there are a large number of P2P companies who have donned the guise of internet finance to provides illegal financial services – it seems you only need a webpage in order to call it internet finance. I feel that this is ridiculous.
“True internet finance depends upon data technology, depends upon data risk control systems, depends upon data accumulation credit systems. When you have large volumes of data, you need to use AI machines to perform risk control – this is true internet finance.”
Ant Financial, an affiliate of Jack Ma’s Alibaba, is currently the world’s largest fintech company, presiding over mobile and online payments platform Alipay as well as Yu’e Bao, the world’s largest money market fund.
