Italian authorities investigate Bank of China Milan branch on suspected money laundering-related transfers
As Italy’s economy is struggling to find growth opportunities, well-off Chinese immigrants and businessmen seem to do well in the country. Chinese individuals are reported to be buying everything from fancy cars to real estate and are opening small businesses. But according to local government, their prosperity was not reflected in the local tax records to the extent the government expected it to be.
Alibaba in partnership with Luxembourg Consulate in Shanghai to issue credit-based visas
The versatile internet powerhouse Alibaba group is now sitting on the goldmine of big data and is innovatively monetizing it through internet finance. This time Alibaba Group's online payment system Sesame Credit applies the cutting edge big data-based credit rating system in partnership with Luxembourg's Consulate General in Shanghai for a launch of a credit-based visa application service.
Is MYBank’s self-reliance on in-house cloud feeding the de-IOE (IBM, Oracle, EMC) trend?
Since Beijing became more cautious on the use of foreign technology in the banking sector, Chinese banks have been intensely trying to figure out what to do next. One bank is not waiting and it's no surprise that the soon-to-launched Alibaba-affiliated internet private bank MYbank is moving in lockstep with the government policy as well as develop its own long-term technology strategy. MYbank announced it will be using an in-house cloud computing system instead of products from IBM, Oracle and EMC (IOE).
A growth enterprise board in China is a part of stock exchange that has lower listing requirements and allows smaller, often high-tech enterprises to trade shares and gain access to a transparent funding channel. ChiNext, a part of Shenzhen Stock Exchange, is the southern city's growth enterprise board, has been very successful at attracting investors and issuers. Beijing also has its New Third Board, and now Shanghai, Eastern China's innovation center, will provide a venue for small high-growth companies to raise money on the capital markets.
Who will be the Square of China?
Since its launch 3 years ago, popular third party POS payment provdier Square has gained a respectable level of global adoption. Clients have access to 130 currencies in four languages worldwide. Despite the great success, we haven’t seen any presence of Square in China.
The US online payment service provider PayPal has big plans for helping merchants and customers worldwide. Earlier this week, it has announced his partnership with the most popular payment card in China UnionPay to provide Chinese cross-border shoppers with an easier way to complete their transactions via UnionPay Online payments. The ability to make purchases using UnionPay cards has been one of the most requested features from Chinese customers.
A whole generation of ordinary Chinese have been neglected in terms of wealth management and banking with high minimum investment thresholds or VIP-only products preventing only a select few from getting access to traditional wealth management products. Alibaba and Tencent have brought innovative internet finance based services such as Tenpay or Alipay to the market and have further opened up wealth management to an entire new segment of the market with 'mass-market' wealth management products. China’s e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba now is after banking industry.
Want to unload that bad debt on your books? Now you can on Taobao. Cinda Asset Management, one of China’s Big 4 state-owned bad asset managers, has partnered with Taobao to sell RMB 4 billion-worth of creditor’s rights on the e-commerce company's asset disposal platform. This is seen as another potentially very successful cooperation between finance and internet industries as a large asset owner will have access to many new buyers through Taobao’s powerful channel.
China's taxi / ride hailing app sector is heating up again as internet giant backed Didi and KuaiDi Dache are about to launch 1 billion RMB subsidy for premium cars coupon. Not to be outdone, competitor Yidao teamed up with Baidu. The country's leading search engine allows Yidao to embed its chauffeured car service in its map app.
With over 270 million active Alipay Wallet users and extensive collaborations with overseas global online merchants, Chinese e-commerce payment powerhouse Alipay now is making its expansion into China’s domestic offline stores and soon to the global market.
Last week's Hanergy and Goldin Financial sell-offs test Hong Kong market at a critical point
The shares of three companies recently experienced an unprecedented slump, which nobody can precisely explain.
At a recent conference, the Asset Management of China (AMAC) declared that there are 713 hedge funds in Zhejiang province alone – a surprisingly large number, considering some of the statements by international experts as recent as 2014 that there are no more than ten hedge funds in China. Futures trading is also up 30% on the main exchanges in China - a strong correlation.
Xiaomi teamed up with E Fund Management to offer a new money market fund last week. The fund will be available on the wealth management app installed on the Xiaomi operating system and will be similar to products offered by Alibaba and Tencent in that it offers higher-than traditional bank deposit rates and allows nearly instant liquidity.
A new partnership between CreditEase and Wellington has changed the rules with an incredibly easy way for the increasingly wealthy middle-class to invest abroad.
Globally there have been few examples, if any, of traditional financial institutions getting full use of customer big data to provide a mass-market asset management product. There are of course specialized hedgefunds and wealth management products that track market sentiment, but few beyond that. In China however, Internet giant Baidu and now, more recently, E-commerce tycoon Alibaba group are both changing the fintech landscape by how they are leveraging big data to bring new products to market.
According to data from the People's Bank of China, by the end of 2014 China had 614,900 ATMs in operation across the country, up 18.25% from 2013. While certainly a rapid growth, it was actually slower than a year ago when the number of networked ATMs increased by 25.12%, and is significantly lower than its peak growth of 36.18% in 2008.
P2P woes continue in China as illegal fundraising through P2P platforms grew in both 2014 and 2015. When will the government intervene?
Accenture recently released its Accenture North America Consumer Digital Banking Survey for 2015. One of the findings was that banks run the risk of being seen as a 'utility' to their customers. Could the same thing happen in China?
Nearly done with banking and capital markets, China shifts its focus to opening up the insurance industry
You would be forgiven for missing the news with most of the focus this week on Shanghai's never ending stock market run or the latest mention of liberialization and opening in the bank card clearing market, but now it appears that the insurance industry will be the next segment of China's transforming financial industry to be opened up to competition.
It appears, as the WSJ reported, that the implementation of China's controversial banking technology rules has been paused for the moment. But what can we expect in the future?
How do foreign credit score and risk management companies fit into China’s shadow banking industry?
China's P2P industry, which is technically a shadow banking / lending channel, continued its explosive growth in 2014 as 1,200 new platforms launched and transaction volumes grew 2.39 times as compared to 2013. At the same time the number of platforms suffering serious problems was 275, up 260% from the year before.
Shanghai and Hong Kong hit new highs, but Chinese investors still stick to what they know
Chinese investors continue to join the market rally at an unprecedented pace. Records were broken as 1.6 million accounts were opened from March 23rd and March 27th and only slightly less in the following week – 1.5 million...more than the population of a small city..., well a small city outside of China.
China launches deposit insurance
Talked about for many years, one of the key reforms in China's outsized and ambitious plan is the launch of the deposit insurance program. An announcement yesterday confirmed that the program will finally launch in May.
P2P platform Lufax raises offshore capital, IPO planned
Shanghai based Lufax, one of China’s biggest P2P platforms, has just received a USD 483 million-worth investment from foreign institutional and private investors. Is the investment rearranging deck-chairs on a sinking ship or a clear signal that everything is fine in the troubled P2P industry?
China's bull market is a test for brokerage technology
As China's bull market continues, new accounts are being opened and trading volume is growing. One unexpected outcome is that existing capital markets technology is being stress tested and it doesn't seem to be coping that well...
Alipay Wallet moves further into public services
Alipay has already gotten into transport cards, bill payments and hospitals in China, now it's focused on public services again with local government partnerships.
The new fashion of Asia stock connects
With the Taiwan - Singapore now on track for year end, we are seeing a tremendous uptick in cross-border trading efforts, but instead of M&A, exchanges are focusing on trading links.
A few days ago, the upstart Chinese manufacturer of android-based smartphones Xiaomi launched a public beta of their new online money-market fund. With Chinese tech companies furiously investing in and creating platforms bundling key products and services together, could we see Xiaomi competing directly with Alipay and Wechat in the near future?
Rumors abound that Apple has finally reached an agreement with China UnionPay and is rolling out the China version of Apple Pay in April. According to a Bank of China-related Weibo post, April 15th is the day of official announcement and April 28th will be launch day. The timing is close to what was expected, even though there were reports that negotiations were going less smoothly than predicted.
So over the past week, the internet has been aflutter with talk of Bitcoin and China again. A March 10th Goldman equity research note entitled 'The Future of Finance' offered a few comments about Bitcoin in China seem to have reignited the debate about Bitcoin's place in the Middle Kingdom. There are a lot of misconceptions out there, we felt we needed to set a few of them straight.
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China International Payment System - What to Expect?
News is that the China International Payment System (CIPS) is ready and selected 20 banks are about to start testing, among which seven are subsidiaries of foreign banks. The new system was developed by PBoC and aims to be a significant improvement on the current way companies make cross-border RMB payments.
Recently CUP announced a cooperation with some of Shanghai’s well-known hospitals to launch an app, where users will be able to perform many of administrative hospital visit procedures on the mobile. This is the first step of CUP’s Modern Hospital plan, aimed to connect major hospitals to its payment solution.
Chinese banks in 2014: another good year
The China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) released its annual banking industry statistics for 2014. Banks accumulated RMB 172.3 trillion in assets, up 13.87% since 2013. The Big 5 large commercial banks had a slower growth rate than the joint-stock commercial banks, 8.25% and 16.50% respectively.
Why the new China cross-border ecommerce platform by SF Express might be a game changer
There are now 18 million shoppers in China who buy goods from international platforms and have already spent RMB 216 billion doing so, according to Nielsen. The market is constantly growing, boosted by a more affluent middle class and government support. In our Top 10 China Banking Technology Trends report we talk about how China UnionPay extended its cross-border payments expertise to the ecommerce and joined the industry with its Haigou service in 2014. A new entrant to the cross-border e-commerce market is SF Express. SF is one of China's major logistics and delivery companies and relies on an entirely different set of strengths to develop thier business.