The Chinese central bank has outlined a schedule for “rectification” of China’s online lending sector with the launch of regulatory trials around the country.
Zou Lan (邹澜), head of the People’s Bank of China’s (PBOC) financial markets department, said that PBOC will endeavour to “basically complete resolution of outstanding risk in the online lending sector” within the first half of 2020.
State-owned media reports that local online loan regulatory trials have already commenced in a total of six locations, including Beijing and the Fujian province city of Xiamen.
Zou Lan said that since the start of the year online lending risk rectification work had achieved major progress, with sizeable declines in the loan balance, number of lenders and borrowers, as well as number of online lending entities in operation.
According to a report from Wangdai Zhijia (网贷之家) as of the end of September the number of regularly operating platforms in China’s P2P lending sector had fallen to 646, as compared to 1021 at the end of 2018.
