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JulThe People's Bank of China, Xinhua News Agency and China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission as the guiding unit, Economic Information Daily of Xinhua News Agency, Economic Information Agency, cooperated with China Construction Bank, Ping An Puhui Enterprise Management Co. Ltd, etc. held "2019 Inclusive Finance Summit" on June 28, 2019. On the eve of the opening of the forum, Wu Xiaoqiu, an economist and Vice President of Renmin University of China, accepted an exclusive interview with the Economic Information Daily on the hot topics related to inclusive finance.
Promote financial supply side reform
Reporter: How do you understand inclusive finance?
Wu Xiaoqiu: Inclusive finance is an important direction of China's financial reform. The core of inclusive finance is actually to enable all types of enterprises and groups to obtain financial services that match their needs under the framework of the Chinese financial system.
Reporter: In order to achieve the goal of inclusive finance, it is very important to promote structural reform of the financial supply side. What do you think for this?
Wu Xiaoqiu: Only the corresponding financial industry can serve enterprises of different formats. Traditional financial institutions, especially large commercial banks, have the responsibility to care about and pay attention to the financial needs of small and medium-sized enterprises. They should also provide wealth management for more people through reforms, including convenient payment services and compliant Internet financial services. It is a requirement that traditional financial institutions must meet in the new format.
As far as financing are concerned, large financial institutions can also serve small, medium and micro-sized enterprises through some necessary policy arrangements and instructions. However, because of its large span and the lack of some basic materials of these small, medium, and micro-sized enterprises, there are indeed some obstacles, because both large commercial banks and small financial institutions are commercial organizations. First and foremost, they cannot lose money, and must control the risk.
Therefore, it is more important for inclusive finance to promote the supply-side structural reform of finance, and to promote financial technology so that new financial formats can better identify the risks of small and micro enterprises, thus providing them with corresponding loans, such as the "Ali Small Loan" of Ant Finance is a case.
Improve the level of financial technology
Reporter: From the practice of the financial industry, technology-enabled finance is effective. Through science and technology, it can develop a long-tail market that traditional financial institutions have not taken care of. However, technology's empowerment of traditional financial institutions is also limited, and technological empowerment cannot solve all problems. From this perspective, inclusive finance is inseparable from the support of financial technology. How to understand the integration of inclusive finance and financial technology?
Wu Xiaoqiu: It is very important to improve the level of financial technology.
Financial services have three basic tasks: the first is resource allocation, also known as financing; the second is payment and liquidation; the third is wealth management.
Inclusive Finance has the responsibility and obligation to provide convenient, safe and low-cost payment services for the whole society. Before the emergence of third-party payment, payment settlement is mainly done through commercial banks, including payment by credit card, check, money order, etc. These traditional methods are relatively slow, and the financial system included in inclusive finance should create fast, safe, and low-cost payment methods. With the development of financial technology, third-party payment methods such as Alipay and WeChat payment have greatly facilitated the daily consumption and expenditure of ordinary people.
Wealth management is to create a series of relatively transparent financial assets, and in fact is an important part of inclusive finance. For example, people who buy 500 yuan or 1,000 yuan of wealth management products each month also need to provide a wealth management that matches their needs, and Yu'ebao is this type of financial product.
In short, the realization of inclusive finance depends on that first is reform, then high technology, and the last is key transformation.
Solve the problem of information asymmetry
Reporter: China Construction Bank, the organizer of the Inclusive Finance Summit Forum, put forward the “three major strategies”: inclusive finance, housing leasing, and financial technology. Liu Guiping, President of China Construction Bank, said that the essence of inclusive finance is to improve the synergy and inclusiveness of the financial system through digital technology and market-oriented operations, so as to realize financial services to the general public. You just mentioned the "Ali Small Loan" of Ant Finance, and the financial technology companies including "BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent)" have developed some inclusive financial products. In your opinion, what kind of next trend will the company's integration development with big commercial bank show?
Wu Xiaoqiu: High-tech or financial penetration of technology is presented as financial technology. For example, the Internet, big data, cloud computing, and block chain, these all belong to the underlying technology of financial technology. Because there is no traditional financial field, we must embed these elements into the traditional financial system, so that the entire operating platform and runway occur. Change, so the core of financial technology is application.
Why do we have to inject financial technology? It is mainly to solve a problem that cannot be solved in financial activities for a long time, that is, the asymmetry of information. Information transparency and asymmetry must be addressed before effective pricing can be made. As a result, the effectiveness and risk of finance will be reduced and the efficiency will increase. This is the foundation of the integration of inclusive finance and financial technology.
Medium, small and micro-sized enterprise’s "expensive funding" is still difficult to solve
Reporter: Since the end of 2018, the state has issued a large number of policies to encourage the development of inclusive finance, and to solve the financing difficulties and financing problems of SMEs. What do you think is the effect? Did it meet expectations?
Wu Xiaoqiu: The problem of financing difficulties will be gradually alleviated through structural reforms and the implantation of financial technology, but the problem of financing is more difficult to solve. The current plan is the structural reform of finance, and the penetration of financial technology can lengthen the financial service chain.
The core problem of the reform of the financial supply side is that financial supply is inefficient, and the demand is misplaced, and the supply capacity is weak. The supply-side reform is to meet the increasingly diverse financial needs of people, including financing needs, payment needs, wealth management needs, but also to meet the diversified asset needs of investors. Therefore, it is necessary to promote the diversity of financing supply, so that corporate financiers can freely choose financing tools to achieve a financial balance, thereby grasping the risk and cost balance. At the same time, investors are free to combine assets according to risk appetite. Assets have good liquidity and transparency. In fact, supply-side reform is to achieve multiple financing instruments, diversification of assets, and marketization of mechanisms.
Inclusive finance certainly cannot make big money.
Reporter: Some banks said that “doing inclusive finance does not make money”. How do you evaluate this? Will it be improved?
Wu Xiaoqiu: Inclusive Finance certainly can't make big money, it can only be close to the balance between profit and disadvantage. Because there is no scale effect after all, to make a loan of 50,000 yuan and a loan of 50 million yuan, the labor cost is similar, but the scale demand is completely different. And from the current point of view, financial institutions lend to small and micro-sized enterprises without information and big data platforms, the risk is still a bit large. Relevant institutions must strengthen risk management and control, risk identification, and credit screening for loan companies.
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