In recent years, with the application and development of artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain and other technologies in all walks of life, in the financial field, cutting-edge information technology has also brought challenges to the traditional financial industry. More and more financial institutions and enterprises at home and abroad are aware of the great impact of the cutting-edge technology of information technology on the financial field. In 2014, the CBRC issued document No. 39: Guidance on the application of secure and controllable information technology to strengthen the network security and informatization construction of the banking industry (hereinafter referred to as "Document No. 39"), proposing that major financial institutions and enterprises should cultivate and develop the independent and controllable ability of information technology and improve the application rate of localized software and hardware equipment. Under this policy background, major financial institutions have established R & D centers to cultivate independent R & D capabilities. However, in the research and exploration of cutting-edge financial technology, the degree of autonomy is still low. Most financial institutions and enterprises still tend to digest and localize existing technologies. For the landing and application of cutting-edge technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence in the financial field, they mainly adopt the joint modeling and development with external fintech companies. The R & D capabilities of core technologies and cutting-edge technologies are still not self controllable. At the same time, due to the fact that the external financial technology companies or Internet companies do not carry out financial business, the technical solutions provided by them can not fully meet the business needs of financial institutions. There is still a gap between the application of cutting-edge technologies and the needs of front-line businesses, and they lack motivation in using financial technology to create new financial business scenarios, and truly realize technology driven refined management with the financial field There is still a gap in the goal of business innovation. As a state-owned financial AMCs, most of them have comprehensive financial licenses and rich and complex financial business scenarios. Carrying out financial technology research and development can provide strong support for the company to prevent financial risks and improve the level of refined management.
1、 Current situation and trend of financial technology development at home and abroad
1. definition and development status of fintech.
(1) Definition of fintech. Fintech (Financial Technology) is the abbreviation of fi- Nano Tech nology, which can be simply understood as fi nance +technology (Technology), but it is not a simple combination of the two. It refers to innovating the products and services provided by the traditional financial industry through various scientific and technological means, improving efficiency and effectively reducing operating costs. The current application of fintech services at home and abroad can be seen as a combination of traditional financial services and information technology, covering business scenarios and fields such as savings, payment, investment and financing. In recent years, fintech services have become a hot spot in the engineering and academic circles. According to the data of Google Trends, the current global attention to fintech is 10 times that of three years ago.
(2) Application direction of financial technology. From the perspective of application, financial technology covers almost all current industry fields, including banking, securities, insurance, funds, consumer finance, and specially derived regulatory technology to meet the needs of the regulatory level. The specific penetration of these industries and scenarios is reflected in the following aspects: in the banking field, it is mainly reflected in retail business, online lending and financing, risk control and electronic payment; in the securities field, it is mainly reflected in asset management and intelligent investment adviser; in the insurance field, it is mainly reflected in risk control and online business; the fund field includes asset management and quantitative trading. For example, the common quantitative XX fund is actually a procedural transaction, The field of consumer finance is even more inseparable from financial technology. Due to the characteristics of small amount dispersion, it is inseparable from the support of financial technology from customer acquisition to risk control and collection. For the regulatory authorities, financial technology has also become a conventional means, which has derived regulatory technology. In addition, the digital currency that the central bank is studying now and the electronic payment that we are closely related to everyday are all specific applications of financial technology. In short, with the continuous development of financial technology at this stage, finance and real life are more closely integrated; The impact of the realization of fintech on the financial industry is reflected in the reconstruction of the existing financial industry, the enhancement of the richness of the financial scene, and the expansion of the objects covered by the financial business.
(3) Supporting technology of financial technology. The support behind the application scenarios of fintech is the increasingly mature cutting-edge information technology. At present, these technologies are commonly referred to as ABCD or basic in the industry. Where, a stands for artificial intelligence, B for block chain, C for cloud computing, D for big data, basic and similar, B for big data, a for AI, s for social network, I for the Internet, and C for cloud computing. These technologies actually constitute the main technical framework of current fintech. For example, cloud computing provides the carrier of hardware. Many models, algorithms and applications are deployed on cloud computing platforms. Big data provides the ability support of the data layer to collect and sort out the data generated in financial activities, so that it can be easily called by other applications. Mobile Internet is the main way to generate data and the infrastructure for application deployment, such as Alipay Mobile banking and other financial technology applications are deployed on the mobile Internet. Because mobile Internet events occur all the time in our daily life, artificial intelligence and blockchain are specific application technologies for scenarios such as risk control, payment and clearing, and digital currency.
With the support of the above application technologies, many financial technology companies have emerged in the world, some are emerging financial technology companies, and some are traditional financial institutions' transformation towards financial technology. The application fields of global fintech business cover six financial fields: payment and clearing, loan financing, retail banking, wealth management, insurance and transaction settlement (digital currency), which are fully integrated into all traditional financial sectors.
To sum up, the current global financial technology development shows the following characteristics:
First, internationally, old developed countries such as Europe and the United States are ahead of developing countries in both technology and application scenarios. As the financial industry has been developed for a long time and the industrial chain is relatively perfect, it is easier to find new business opportunities and scenarios in the collision and intersection between the financial industry and information technology. The overall development level of North America and Europe is stable and relatively balanced. The financial technology ecosystem of the old financial power - Britain is actively supported, with good operation strategies and an industry-leading financial technology political environment.
Second, fintech companies in North America and Europe have a variety of businesses; China is mainly involved in the fields of payment, lending, insurance and wealth management. It has an emerging financial technology payment and e-commerce trading system, with huge market potential. Among the top 100 global fintech companies in 2016, five of the top 10 are from China. Among these 100 companies, the listed companies are mainly distributed in lending, payment, regulatory technology, digital currency, data analysis, insurance, capital market, wealth management, crowdfunding, blockchain and accounting. 2. the evolution of China's financial technology. Compared with foreign countries, the development and evolution of China's financial technology started relatively late. The earliest was before 2014. In order to effectively improve work efficiency, traditional financial institutions began to build their own information systems. The most representative was ICBC, which began to purchase the most advanced IBM medium and large-sized computers at that time in the 1980s. Since 2014, the payment field has gradually developed, the application of financial technology has been transferred from the traditional financial back-end support to the front-end, and e-banking has become popular. In 2007, the establishment of auction loan has become a landmark event in the development of domestic financial technology. Auction loan has begun to use a data-driven method to build a credit factory for personal credit business, and the machine learning model has begun to truly participate in the credit approval decision-making of finance, In 2013, the emergence of yu'e Bao had an impact on the bank's retail business, putting pressure on traditional finance. At the same time, it was also the beginning of the development of Internet strategy by major traditional financial institutions. However, at this stage, fintech enterprises with certain technology accumulation in the early stage have obvious advantages both in technology and experience. After 2016, the development of financial technology has penetrated into all fields of the national economy and the people's livelihood. With the continuous development and maturity of cutting-edge information technology means, the financial field has begun a wave of "disintermediation" by using technical means. Some experts believe that under this trend, it will develop into a non-financial society in the future.
The whole evolution process can be divided into three stages according to the current division of the financial technology community. The first stage is the financial technology 1.0 stage, which is also the stage of financial information construction. The main characteristics of this stage are policy guidance and capital support. At the policy level, the symbol of this stage is the science and technology progress law issued in 1993, which clearly points out the need to develop the application of science and technology in the financial field. The second stage, fintech 2.0, is also a stage of vigorous development of Internet finance. The financial industry has built an online business platform to realize the interconnection of the asset side, transaction side, payment side and capital side of the financial business. Through the reform of traditional financial channels, information sharing and business integration have been realized. The characteristic of this stage is that science and technology promotes financial innovation and drives the improvement of various regulatory policies. The third stage is the stage of rapid development of financial technology. New technologies such as big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence are used to change the traditional sources of financial information collection, risk pricing and investment decision-making process, replacing the role of credit intermediary of financial institutions, greatly improving the efficiency of traditional finance, so as to realize the deep integration of technology and finance and release production capacity. At present, the development and evolution of China's financial technology is very rapid, and it has achieved leapfrog development in some aspects, mainly thanks to the massive data generated by the huge domestic customer group, and there is still a certain blind spot in data supervision, especially in information security. In terms of technology, there is still a certain gap with developed countries, but this gap is gradually narrowing. For example, Internet payment, PayPal in the United States started business in 1998, while Alipay, the earliest in China, did not appear until six years later, and wechat payment did not begin until 2016. We are only 2 years later than the UK and the US in terms of online lending based on big data risk control. Therefore, the development of China's financial technology is in a process of rapid catch-up.
From the level of supervision and market scale, we can also see the evolution of China's current fintech development. Among them, 2015 was a year of blowout in the scale of the financial technology market. According to the current growth rate, the scale of the financial technology market is expected to reach trillion in 2020. At the same time, the regulatory authorities also pay more and more attention to the development of financial technology. In may2017, the people's Bank of China set up a financial technology committee to strengthen the research, planning and overall coordination of financial technology work. The rapid development of financial technology forced the innovation of the regulatory authorities, and the supervision of financial technology has also moved from disorderly supervision to standardization.
2、 Development status of Interbank Financial Technology
Under the above background, in order to find out the direction and development mode of fintech R & D, this paper conducted research on interbank financial institutions, mainly state-owned AMCs, and many financial enterprises directly under the CBRC. The research and development of financial technology in banking financial institutions started early, the innovation of financial technology in non banking institutions is still in its infancy, and trust, securities, consumer finance, etc. are in the forefront. Most interbank R & D of financial technology began in 2015. The reason is that in 2014, the CBRC issued document No. 39, which pointed out that since 2015, banking financial institutions should arrange an annual information budget of no less than 5% to support the institutions to carry out forward-looking, innovative and planning research around the safe and controllable information system. With the changes of social environment, economic environment and policy environment, the external environment has effectively promoted the financial technology research and development of these financial institutions in recent years.
Although financial institutions carry out financial technology research and development late, they are involved in the cutting-edge technology field. The transformation of new cutting-edge information technology in the financial field has accelerated. Tracking cutting-edge technology and making use of its capital and talent advantages has gradually become a routine operation of major financial institutions in the financial technology field, such as knowledge maps, complex networks and other technologies that have not been widely used in other fields. In the financial field, some banks and financial institutions have begun to use them for anti fraud In vertical business scenarios such as risk identification, the penetration of cutting-edge technologies in the financial field has significantly accelerated. According to the statistics on the application of risk application topics of the CBRC this year, the hottest topic at present is still related to the application of financial big data. The number of shortlisted topics of trust and Internet finance is ahead of other companies, and the number of shortlisted topics in the field of non-performing asset management is only 2. For banks, due to their early start and systematic accumulation in the field of financial technology, this paper counts the number of patents obtained by major banks in the past 30 years, including more than 900 patents of industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank, and more than half of the patents were obtained after 2011.
In a word, the R & D of fintech in the domestic financial field is still in its infancy. Although it has technically met the requirements of fintech 3.0, there is still a phenomenon of uneven development in terms of popularity and coverage of application scenarios. Especially for non-bank institutions including AMCs, the R & D and application of fintech is still in a very early stage.
3、 Suggestions on AMCs fintech R & D model
Through investigation in the author's work unit, the development of AMCs financial technology is still in the transitional stage of Financial Technology 2.0 to 3.0. It is mainly committed to the construction and operation and maintenance of traditional financial IT systems. Data governance is gradually improving. The construction of financial technology infrastructure such as big data platform is still in progress, and the application of financial technology is still in its infancy. In order to improve the fine management level of AMCs, better serve the main business of non-performing asset management, change from "business guiding technology application" to "technology driven business", and make fintech a strong engine for AMCs to strengthen its main business and serve the real economy, the following problems need to be solved in the current AMCs fintech development:
First, it infrastructure construction needs to be strengthened, especially data infrastructure. As a traditional capital and human intensive enterprise, financial enterprises have become data intensive enterprises. A large amount of data will be generated in daily business activities. These data are not only related to the normal development of various businesses of the enterprise, but also the pulse of enterprise development, and can reflect the operation and risk status of the enterprise in real time. How to make good use of these data is the key to preventing chemical risks and improving the level of refined management. Since the development of big data technology, it has become a "traditional emerging technology" concerned and applied by all walks of life, which can bring the improvement of management level, the assistance of business decision-making and the expansion of business market to enterprises. The soil for big data application is a complete and safe information technology infrastructure. Specifically, it should include two aspects: first, it is necessary to establish perfect physical facilities, including server clusters, disaster recovery and other systems, to meet the needs of data applications from the physical conditions; Second, a complete data governance system needs to be established to ensure that the generated data is authentic, reliable and available to meet the needs of various data applications. Second, the big data intelligent application capability needs to be improved. At the current stage, with the development of machine learning, artificial intelligence and other technologies, big data application has been transformed into big data intelligent application technology. From the traditional data storage and analysis to the use of information abstracted from data to assist decision-making, prevent risks and mine customers. Non performing asset management is the main business of AMCs. In the non-performing asset management activities, the key links such as due diligence, pricing, risk control and customer management still depend on the industry experience of business personnel. With the growth of business, relying solely on human experience not only brings too much repetitive work to business personnel, reduces work efficiency, but also is prone to operational risks. The big data application technology can solve the problems of efficiency and operational risk by analyzing and self-learning past business cases, combined with the intervention of human experience, and provide more powerful support for decision-making. At the same time, at the data level, all operations are transparent, which also helps to reduce operational risks, help the management understand the business status of the company in real time, and realize flat and efficient management from the data application level.
Third, it is imperative to explore the independent frontier of financial science and technology. From the trend analysis, we can see that the development and update frequency of financial technology has gradually stood at the forefront of the information technology field, and even led the development of emerging information technology in some aspects. In this case, the development level of financial technology constitutes a "digital gap" and a "smart gap" between large and small companies. If we fail to grasp the application of cutting-edge financial technology in time and catch up when science and technology spawns new business scenarios, we are bound to lose our first-hand advantage, and the update and iteration speed of technology is changing with each passing day. In the field of financial technology, the time and resource cost to cross the "gap" will increase exponentially with the expansion of technology generation gap. The ups and downs of traditional financial institutions in this wave of financial technology also reveal this law. In the process of financial technology gradually occupying the proportion of financial business, all financial enterprises are under the "Black Forest Law", and the rapidly generated scientific and technological forces will have a huge impact on the traditional financial industry from different dimensions in a short time, and even have a subversive impact on the business model of a certain industry, When fintech becomes a "moat" of a financial enterprise, it will greatly strengthen the viability of the enterprise in the "Black Forest Law" system. Therefore, in order to consolidate the position of the industry, increase investment in financial technology research and development, promote the independent mastery of cutting-edge financial technology and the formation of productivity, and build a "technology moat" are one of the supporting conditions for the healthy and vigorous development of AMCs in the future.
The main direction of fintech R & D is fintech driven, platform product collaboration, and focus on improving the financial big data integration capability, including big data infrastructure construction, internal stock data structural governance and external multi-source heterogeneous data integration, as well as fintech product innovation capability, including enterprise business and personal business application product innovation, in order to cover the current business direction of AMCs. Especially in the research and development of big data intelligent application technology, we hope to rely on the technology scenario driven model to promote the research and development and implementation of big data intelligent applications that meet the business needs of AMCs.
"Doing business with a sword" has been a fine tradition of the Chinese nation since ancient times. Under the background of the continuous expansion of the application scenarios of financial technology in the financial field, as a state-owned financial asset management company, mastering the independent and controllable advanced financial technology is tantamount to holding a sharp sword to cut through thorns and thorns in the current industry.