Reshaping services
At present, domestic fintech companies have been using emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and blockchain, to offer technical support for financial service fields such as customer services, risk management, marketing, investment management and credit assessment.
AI has become a leading trend in the world of finance, making financial services smarter by mining data from massive stores of information, said Fan Zhiming, head of Ant Financial's wealth management unit.
CloudWalk Technology, a high-tech company based in Chongqing, displays its facial recognition system at a recent Beijing trade show. (Photo by Bao Xinguo/for China Daily)
As a core engine of Alibaba's financial affiliate Ant Financial, the world's largest third-party payments platform, AI has been used widely in the company's businesses, including intelligent customer service, transaction risk control, marketing, virtual damage assessment for car insurance, loan approval and anti-fraud processes.
The company's data showed that Alipay's smart customer service, which can handle 2 million to 3 million user queries per day, only needs one second to complete five rounds of queries, which is 30 to 60 times more efficient than any human service.
At present, more than 120 customers in the insurance, securities, government and e-commerce industries are using Ant Financial's AI technology, according to the company.
Ant Financial opened up its AI capabilities to 10 financial institutions on June 14, 2017, setting up virtual shops at its independent wealth management platform Ant Fortune. The company said average daily trading volume of its cooperative fund companies increased 243 percent in just one month after they set up their Fortune Accounts on the platform.
For JD Finance, the finance arm of China's second-largest e-commerce giant, its core advantage lies in the massive, multidimensional and dynamic technology of big data.
Relying on e-commerce, finance and various third-party data generated by hundreds of millions of JD users and its millions of partners, the company has explored a series of technologies and applications in fields including risk management, by using technologies such as blockchain and AI.
A young visitor learns about the latest in anti-counterfeiting money technology at a financial show in Beijing last year. (Photo by Da Wei/for China Daily)
Inclusive finance
While regulators have been encouraging banks to support small and micro enterprises this year, the fintech sector has already paved the way for inclusive finance and SME-focused financial services.
Ant Financial was named in MIT Technology Review's 2017 50 Smartest Companies list for applying AI technologies to its lending business and exploring blockchain technologies to build a more transparent platform.
The company's small loans effectively support the fragmented credit demands of China's massive population of SMEs and individual entrepreneurs who find it difficult to obtain loans under the traditional banking system, to help them to grow and innovate.
Based on big data and internet technologies, Alipay has been able to offer its 310 loan services to rural consumers and small business owners without collateral guarantees. That means it takes three minutes to make online application, one second for lending assessment, and zero manual intervention in the whole process.
A staff member of WeBank, a Shenzhen-based institution, shows off facial recognition technology at a 2017 trade fair in Beijing. (Photo by Da Wei/for China Daily)
