Fintech helps China's internet giants draw their financial roadmaps

Lai Zhiming, vice-president of Tencent, made a keynote speech at the Inaugural China Fintech Conference held by Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance in Beijing on July 10, 2016. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

China's leading internet companies claimed at a conference held by Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance that they are more willing to cooperate with, rather than challenge or even overthrow traditional financial institutions, to meet people's unsatisfied financial needs in the country.

Lai Zhiming, vice-president of Tencent, said at the Inaugural China Fintech Conference in Beijing on Sunday that his company wants to bank on its finance cloud to further connect traditional banks, fund companies and securities firms. The finance cloud, whose computing capability proved its power by successfully handling deliveries of 13.28 billion virtual red envelopes with actual money in them on Feb 7, the eve of China's Lunar New Year of the Monkey.

He said that Tencent's Licaitong wealth-management platform has helped fund companies gain 60 million customers since it went online in January 2014. This means the number of customers this platform has acquired in one year is equivalent to the number of customers these companies could have acquired in traditional ways over 10 years, he added. Licaitong, a part of the finance cloud, connects Tencent's huge customer base, including Wechat and QQ users, with various fund companies.

In addition to this, Tencent has saved 4 billion yuan in costs for Chinese banks which have opened accounts on its WeChat platform to serve their customers, including enabling credit card payments.