Fintopia's CEO Speaks at the 2018 Money 20/20 Conference

BEIJING, Nov. 28, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Liu Yongyan, Co-founder and CEO of Fintopia (the "Company"), a leading global Fintech company, recently shared his views on China's online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending at the 2018 Money 20/20 Conference with over 3,000 industry leaders from companies such as VISA, Ant Financial, Tencent Financial, JPMorgan Chase and Citibank, among others.

Credit inquiry goes online

Compared with traditional financial services, P2P lending bridges investors and borrowers by information via online platforms. "The most important value of P2P lending is to supplement the traditional credit inquiry system and to serve people who cannot be served by it," said Liu.

Among China's population of 1.4 billion, only 480 million people have access to bank loans thanks to their credit records available by the end of 2017. In comparison, the credit inquiry system in the United States covers 92% of its population and it took over a century to achieve it. Should China therefore wait another century before it can provide loans to the rest of the population? "The answer is obviously no," Liu said. "While every financial institution is following the same old doctrine of credit inquiry, the emerging mobile technology is becoming a game-changer with the data that it brings to benefit more people with credit services via innovative approach such as P2P lending."

Mobile and smart devices are migrating people's lives from offline to online and collecting all kinds of data from them, especially when transactions happen. The question is how to process and to apply the data to improve our financial services. In Liu's view, there are more ways to assess borrowers' payback abilities other than traditional track records. "Nowadays, a lot of our activities are done online, including purchasing and using financial services. This generates a huge amount of data in multiple dimensions. A successful P2P lending platform should make good use of those data as much as they can and allow credit-worthy people to access loans online conveniently. I believe that at Fintopia, we are leading the way to this future."

Inclusive finance that benefits everyone

It might be a leap of faith for the traditional financial institutions to put aside their doctrine and to embrace a new way of credit inquiry. But Liu believes that it is necessary to revolutionize our perspectives and technologies in order to adapt to the fast-changing world.

The improved living standard and the increased purchasing power of Chinese consumers led to strong growing demand for small loans. Data indicates that borrowers on Fintopia's platforms mainly come from catering industry, manufacturing and service industries. They may be catering staff or factory workers who would likely be the driving force for the future consumption growth in China with their increasing income and these people do have very little access to bank loans under the traditional credit system.

While P2P lending is supplementing the traditional financial services in terms of credit inquiry, it makes the consumption more inclusive for ordinary people who just want to borrow money to cover their daily expenses. "We never stop this quest to build new metrics with online data, different from the ones that existed before, to provide credit where credit is due," said Liu.

About Fintopia

Headquartered in Beijing, China, Fintopia is a leading fintech company that has now branched out to Indonesia, Thailand, Japan and Brazil so that people around the world could benefit from more accessible, efficient and high-quality financial services. The Company has always performed compliance obligations under regulatory requirements in China, successfully registered with the OJK in Indonesia, and won the grand prize NIKKEI Award at FIN/SUM 2018, the largest Fintech summit in Japan.

SOURCE Fintopia Inc.