One of China’s leading economics experts has pointed to fintech and internationalisation as two key trends that are impacting the country’s financial markets.
“The transition to fintech will bring greater diversification to finance,” said Wu XIaoqiu (吴晓求), a Professor of Finance at Renmin University at the 2018 China Finance Annual Forum (中国金融年度论坛) in Beijing on 1 November.
“Do not believe that commercial banks or banking-type financial institutions are perennial actors in China…financial diversification is the fundamental hallmark of today’s digitisation.
“Today payments have already been digitised, which is to say that digital payments have already emerged as the basic development growth.
“In future with improvements to big data, micro-loans will also become more scientific. At present digitisation hasn’t yet been fully achieved, so P2P lending has seen major problems.”
Wu also highlighted the increasing international clout of the Chinese financial sector.
“Chinese finance is entering a stage of internationalisation. This is in keeping with China’s status as a great nation, and is also the requirement for us to serve as a great nation.
“Internationalisation encompasses two extremely important key points – the first is internationalisation of the renminbi, and the other is internationalisation of financial markets.
“Our financial markets must gradually established international finance centres, and this will have especially important significance for modernisation and the rule of law.
“Once a financial centre becomes an international finance centre, this greatly raises improves system of the country, as well as greatly increases the level of public transparency, which will have a major driving influence upon the process of Chinese modernisation.”
