Liu Minxia

    mllmx@msn.com

    CONTINUED innovation and government support will help financial technology (fintech) companies worldwide to offset the effects of slow global growth, sluggish trade, and rising protectionism, a Chinese fintech executive said at the APEC summit Saturday.

    Tang Ning, founder and CEO of CreditEase, a leading Chinese fintech firm, called for expanded global cooperation between businesses and governments to facilitate the growth of the fintech industry while speaking at the APEC CEO Summit in Lima, Peru.

    The CEO Summit, which took place from Thursday to Saturday, brought together the world’s brightest minds in business and politics to discuss critical issues facing the global economy. The CEO Summit was followed by the APEC Leaders’ Meeting yesterday, where leaders of the 21 APEC members, the world’s largest economic bloc, discussed economic growth and human development.

    Tang was the only Chinese fintech executive to attend the CEO Summit. Speaking on the Innovation Economy panel moderated by the Andes Correspondent for the Financial Times, Andres Schipani, he discussed ways in which businesses and governments can work together to foster innovation and expand economic opportunities as well as growth.

    Other participants on the panel included Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Inter-American Development Bank president Luis Alberto Moreno, and Singapore driverless car group nuTonomy CEO Karl Iagemma.

    “One key point to remember is that regulation is not necessarily a bad thing,” Tang said. “Companies and governments are not [working] against each other. What we’ve [learned] in China’s fintech market is that regulation and government intervention can help the market develop [in a healthy manner].”

    The nascent fintech industry, which has seen global investment in it increased more than 12-fold from US$930 million in 2008 to more than US$12 billion in 2014, is also rising rapidly in China.

    “There are some subsectors which are quite new in China, like robo-advising, crowdfunding, insurance technology, and blockchain. But [when it comes to] marketplace lending and payments, the technology [has already been around for] more than 10 years,” he said.

    CreditEase, which set up the country’s first peer-to-peer (P2P) lending company 10 years ago, has a network covering 251 cities and 93 rural areas in China. It listed its P2P arm, Yirendai, on the New York Stock Exchange last year.

    “China’s fintech market is the largest in the world. That has been a joint effort between the government and Chinese fintech companies,” Tang said. Smart regulation, which is to be not too rigid or too flexible, is the key, according to Tang, who also noted that the government can use technology to enforce smart regulation.