China’s Online Financial Sector Comes of Age

Liu Mingkang

Liu Mingkang, a former chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, is BCT Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Global Economics and Finance at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

DEC 2, 2015, Project Syndicate

BEIJING – Last month, China’s leaders revealed details of the 13th Five-Year Plan, which will guide the economy’s trajectory until 2020. Gone are the directives to expand industrial production at a breakneck pace that characterized previous five-year plans. Now, the focus is on achieving sustainable long-term growth, underpinned by domestic consumption, a stronger services sector, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

The Internet – which already has more than 680 million active users in China – will play a key role in facilitating this shift. In particular, online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, a streamlined approach to credit allocation, may hold the key to expanding and deepening China’s financial sector, enabling firms to grow and innovate, and bolstering domestic consumption.

The grip banks have over their customers is weakening

Date: 26-10-2015
Source: The Economist
Subject: Cracking the vault

A FEW dollars spent at Starbucks, a monthly mortgage payment, a Netflix fee, Starbucks again: bank-account statements are not exactly exciting stuff. But there is gold hidden in this by-product of our financial lives, or so many budding technology firms believe. A host of startups crave access to the data and are pitching services, from budgeting apps to cheaper loans, to those who open their books to them. Yet banks worry that co-operating is the first step towards losing the lucrative grip they have on their customers. 

Squeezing insights out of a bank statement is hardly at the cutting edge of big data. Years of salary payments confirm stable employment; bounced cheques hint at carelessness; regular green fees suggest an interest in golf. Banks implicitly use balance and income information when making loan decisions. That has typically given them a leg up over such rivals as consumer-lending companies, which have to base offers of credit on less detailed information.

Peer-to-peer lending: From the people, for the people

Date: 07-05-2015
Source: The Economist
But will financial democracy work in a downturn?

SAVERS DO NOT get much in the way of interest from their banks these days. But a different logic seems to apply to borrowers, who still often pay double-digit rates for credit—if they can get it at all. That has attracted a number of outfits offering to connect those who need cash with those who have a surplus of it. The rapid growth of such “peer-to-peer” lenders has been one of fintech’s most visible successes. The biggest such firm, Lending Club, based in San Francisco, listed its shares in December to a clamour reminiscent of the 1999 tech boom.

Fans compare peer-to-peer lenders to other pioneers of the “sharing economy”. Like Uber with cars and Airbnb with accommodation, the newcomers are making available a commodity they do not provide themselves: in this case, money. Instead of a bank intermediating between savers and borrowers, the two parties deal with each other directly. The platforms do the credit-scoring and make a profit from arrangement fees, not from the spread between lending and deposit rates.

Peer-to-peer lending: Banking without banks

Date: 27-02-2014
Source: The Economist
By offering both borrowers and lenders a better deal, websites that put the two together are challenging retail banks

SAVERS have never had a worse deal but for most borrowers, credit is scarce and costly. That seeming paradox attracts new businesses free of the bad balance sheets, high costs and dreadful reputations which burden most conventional banks.

Foremost among the newcomers are peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms, which match borrowers and lenders directly, usually via online auctions. The loans issued often comprise many tiny slivers from different lenders. Some P2P platforms slice, dice and package the loans; others allow lenders to pick them. Either way, the result is a strikingly better deal for both sides. Zopa, a British P2P platform, offers 4.9% to lenders (most bank accounts pay nothing) and typically charges 5.6% on a personal loan (which is competitive with the rates most banks charge).

Elsewhere, returns (and risks) are higher. IsePankur, which lends to more than 60,000 people in four euro-zone countries, pays its lenders (who include your correspondent) a stonking 21.45% average net return (after a 3% default rate). Its typical borrowers do not flinch at rates of up to 28%: they are refinancing far costlier credit-card debt and doorstep loans.

Peer-to-peer lending is growing fast in many countries. In Britain, loan volumes are doubling every six months. They have just passed the £1 billion mark ($1.7 billion), though this is tiny against the country’s £1.2 trillion in retail deposits. In America, the two largest P2P lenders, Lending Club and Prosper, have 98% of the market. They issued $2.4 billion in loans in 2013, up from $871m in 2012. The minnows are doing even better, though they are growing from a much lower base.

Neil Bindoff of PwC, a professional-services firm, speaks of a “perfect storm” supporting P2P’s growth. Interest rates are close to zero, the public is fed up with banks, costs are low (one third of a typical bank’s, according to Renaud Laplanche of Lending Club), and e-commerce is becoming part of daily life. People use the internet for peer-to-peer telephony (Skype) and shopping (eBay), so why not loans?

Awareness is still low—a survey by pwc found only 15% of Britons claimed to have heard of the big P2P firms such as Zopa, Funding Circle and RateSetter; 98% had heard of the main banks. Another hurdle in Britain is that P2P is not fully regulated; that will change on April 1st. The Financial Conduct Authority will issue the new rules imminently. In America, people saving for retirement can apply tax breaks to their loans, and offset their losses against profits. Britain’s P2P industry is awaiting a decision to extend tax-free savings schemes to its lenders.