Experts and insiders say with the industry booming in China, the country's plan to modernize its financial services may have just entered a golden era. [Photo: nipic.com]
Internet finance has become a hot topic at the ongoing World Internet Conference.
Experts and insiders say with the industry booming in China, the country's plan to modernize its financial services may have just entered a golden era.
With Tencent's third party mobile payment service being well received, and with Alipay going viral, more and more online businesses have entered the financial world, offering services such as peer-to-peer lending, crowdfunding, microfinance, and wealth management for small- and-micro businesses.
Wu Xiaoqiu, head of the Finance and Securities Institute of Renmin University of China, says Internet finance is currently playing a complementary role in the finance sector, helping the country's traditional financial services transformed to an inclusive mode.
"Internet finance is available to customers that traditional finance missed. Traditional finance used to serve big businesses and rich people, ignoring small and micro businesses. If a financial system just provides service to a specific population, then I don't think it is an efficient system. Therefore, Internet finance has transformed traditional finance to an inclusive finance system."
Speaking at a forum at the Second World Internet Conference, he adds that the development of mobile Internet can make finance services cheaper, while big data can assist risk control.
According to the "2015 Annual Report on China's Internet Finance Development," third party mobile payment services quadrupled in size last year compared with 2013 to nearly six trillion yuan, while P2P lending has grown rapidly.
Xu Ming, Deputy President of Postal Savings Bank of China, says Internet finance provides an opportunity for the innovation of business models and transformation of banking services.
"Internet finance means more opportunities than challenges to traditional commercial banks because it brings inspiration to us. Traditional banks need to be transformed to improve service levels and capabilities. They also need to learn from Internet finance, which has a great advantage in customer experience, client coverage, and the application of big data."
At the same time, since internet finance is still rather new in China, regulation systems are facing challenges adjusting to the finance industry's development.
Dong Dengxin, Head of the Financial and Security Research Institute, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, says only innovation and supervision can promote the healthy development of Internet finance.
"Innovation expands the supervision, making up loopholes in supervision. Many countries encourage innovation because only innovation can promote the development of supervision. Internet finance is a new industry and regulators don't have enough knowledge about it. Therefore they should give it mild tolerance and moderate space for innovation."
According to Guo Qingping, vice-governor of the People's Bank of China, three pairs of relationships need to be taken care of for the Internet finance sector to further develop in the country.
One is the relationship between Internet finance and traditional finance. The second is to properly deal with innovation and risk control. And the third is the relationship between the government and the market.
