The Year of the FinTech Rooster

One of my key forecasts for 2017 is that the fintech buzz will continue, but not in the United States. We need to look to China instead. This is fairly obvious as that country saw the biggest rise in fintech investments in 2016, while investments in the U.S. cooled off. This is pretty well summed up in Citigroup’s Digital Disruption report. The second edition just appeared, and opens with:

The rise of the Chinese dragons reflects a unique combination over the past decade of incredibly rapid digitization and the simultaneous rise of the Chinese mass middle class, along with poorly prepared incumbent financial institutions facing off against entrepreneurial e-commerce and social media ecosystems. It is no surprise to us that China accounted for over 50 percent of total fintech investments globally in the first nine months of 2016 and was the only major region where fintech investments increased in 2016–in fact doubling in China in the first nine months of 2016 versus the same period in 2015.

Most notably, China saw one of its fintech giants emerge on the world stage as Alibaba—the country’s largest online e-commerce company—went global. Payments powerhouse Ant Financial (once a subsidiary if Alibaba just as PayPal was once a unit of Ebay) announced that it seeks European and American clients using its AliPay service. And Alibaba founder and Executive Chairman Jack Ma has risen to the same heady heights as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, or even higher if this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland is anything to go by. Ant is already growing at a phenomenal rate, having gained about 100 million new users in 2016, which took its total above 500 million—or nearly 10 times larger than the world’s biggest banks. Its ambitions don’t stop there. In an interview with CNBC at Davos, Ant Financial CEO Eric Jing said that “we have an ambition to be a global company. My vision (is) that we want to serve 2 billion people in the next 10 years by using technology, by working together with partners _ to serve those underserved.”

The company has never been understated in its ambitions—but to its credit has realized most of them. This is because Chinese internet giants like Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba started in a very different place compared to American internet giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google. The American companies formed to replace old institutions like bookshops. They had a strong, integrated financial system in place, and a well ordered commercial structure. When the Chinese firms began, there was nothing in place to replace. Sure, there were big banks, but these were state owned and had little focus upon customer service or innovation. That has all changed in the last 20 years.

Maybe that’s why, when the chairman of one of the world’s biggest banks was asked recently how technology would change finance, he pointed to the rise of Ant Financial. The veteran chairman—who was not willing to be quoted by name—noted that the Chinese group had acquired a “huge amount of data” and “a great ability to make credit decisions.” The tone of jealousy was hard to miss.

This is because the Chinese internet giants began with a clean sheet of paper and have expanded across China and now the world with their innovative designs. That design began with commerce and communication—Alibaba started as a platform for mum and pop stores to sell their wares—and has expanded into a social and financial ecosystem that can serve all needs through a mobile app. Alibaba and Tencent run not just an internet service, but a payments platform, a social network and more. It is all embracing and fully networked, far more than anything seen outside China.

Between the data analytics that can be applied in that ecosystem, deep learning and contextual commerce capabilities, it’s no wonder the banks are jealous. They should also be concerned, as the Chinese payment model is bound to expand globally and then be copied by the likes of Facebook and Amazon. Happy Chinese New Year!