Boao Live | Industry leaders debate financial technology: Internet finance is not just a name that can be called Fintech

Leifeng.com reported on March 23 that on February 27, 2001, in an obscure town on the east coast of Qionghai City, Hainan Province, politicians from 25 Asian countries and Australia gathered. The founding conference of the Boao Forum for Asia was held here. Today (March 23, 2017), the 16th Boao Forum for Asia 2017 Annual Conference was held in Hainan. Leifeng.com will bring you a lot of dry goods and explosive news.

Among them, at the Fintech forum this afternoon , JD Finance CEO Chen Shengqiang, China Merchants Bank former president Ma Weihua, China Internet Finance Association President Li Dongrong, Lufax CEO Ji Kuisheng and others discussed "Finance and Technology" together, and the moderator was Peter TUFANO, Dean of Sad Business School at Oxford University. Let's take a look at what the guests of the forum said with Leifeng.com.

Host: With the development of science and technology, technology has also begun to be widely applied to the financial field. What impact will this have on the future of finance?

Ma Weihua, former president of China Merchants Bank: I came from traditional finance, but I also experienced the impact of the Internet. The Internet has brought me both joy and sorrow. I was the first Chinese commercial bank to embrace the Internet. It is precisely because of this that today, when the economy is adjusting and the financial industry is facing challenges, our bank should still share the benefits brought by the Internet.

After the wild growth of the Internet, I don’t think the Internet has disrupted traditional banks. Although many disruptions were not completed at that time, I also felt that the Internet did have many inspirations and impacts on traditional finance, including open platforms and customer experience. But my concern is that the wild growth process has also brought a lot of negative things to our financial ecology, which is a lesson we should learn.

Now we have entered the era of technology finance and financial technology. I find that many Internet companies have become technology finance companies. I think:

The Internet is not a flip card and can be called FinTech, and the technology finance industry is not a flip card of the Internet. The Internet should solve our channels, service experience, and customer experience, and solve the problems that allow us to focus on fragmented and inclusive things.

However, I think that fintech is essentially about improving efficiency, and the future of fintech is full of imagination. We need to bring about qualitative changes in the underlying financial architecture of the information society through big data, cloud computing , artificial intelligence , and blockchain. We must be clear today, otherwise we will re-enter an era of wild growth of fintech, and we should try to avoid this from happening.

JD Finance CEO Chen Shengqiang: Actually, there are three concepts mentioned here: Internet finance, financial technology, and technology finance. We must first understand the differences between these three concepts and how to define them.

From our perspective, Internet finance is actually an expansion of channels, while financial technology is a technological revolution. In the past, when people talked about Internet finance, they were using the Internet as a sales channel to sell financial products. Financial technology is actually using a series of technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence , and even blockchain to design financial products.

This is equivalent to not just a concept of a channel, but financial technology actually encompasses it. Channels are only a part of it, not all of it. Financial technology can make things that were previously impossible to do possible, or projects that were previously very costly to do, such as inclusive projects, which are difficult to achieve with traditional methods, but financial technology can actually help achieve them.

The second is to talk about the difference between financial technology and technology finance. Financial technology is to serve financial institutions, while technology finance is more about using technology to do business for yourself. For example, the electronic banking department of a bank may be more of a technology finance concept.

The initial investment in this business will be huge, requiring a lot of data and system investment before it can be realized. This is actually just one dimension. In addition, it is necessary to build anti-fraud systems and anti-money laundering systems. In other words, a series of systems must be complete before we can truly realize the financial business. The financial industry itself is an industry with current income and delayed risks, and the risks will accumulate more and more in the future.

At this point in time, technology has advanced, including the accumulation of data, which has made the financial technology industry possible. In fact, China also has certain advantages in this area. In fact, all these things must not forget a foundation - the essence of finance is still the core foundation, and risk pricing must be the core foundation. Whether it is an Internet finance, a financial technology company, or a technology finance company, these two things must be done well.

Ji Kuisheng, Co-Chairman and CEO of Shanghai Lujiazui International Financial Asset Exchange Co., Ltd. (Lufax): I think we should not be too confident in using new technologies. Many good technologies, many good models, and a lot of good big data still need time to be verified, no matter how smart people are. We still have to do it step by step. I think this is the first point.

Second, if you trust the model too much or make a lot of judgments based on the data trend, these external factors may also change; the more information is combined, the greater the impact of information disclosure. Your success today does not mean success tomorrow, so we must continue to explore whether the judgment will change when the environment changes when using data to make judgments. If you rely on the logic to make judgments, if the logic is wrong, the impact will also be great, which requires us to keep looking at it step by step.

Third, the number of information connections is increasing. If this information is leaked, it will have a huge impact on society and individuals, so data security is also a big issue. We need to do better in many aspects, and the entire market needs to do better.