This Month in Fintech - China (October’22)

Hello Fintech friends,

The much anticipated Fintech Formal is happening tomorrow night (11/11) at the Metropolitan Club. Please get ready to meet some awesome fellow fintech folks and check out the exciting things that are happening in the fintech world! We look forward to seeing many of you there.

There were quite a number of layoffs and hiring freezes that heavily impacted the fintech industry in the past couple of weeks. I wanted to send a reminder that TWIF is here to help: We curated a Talent Collective - an anonymized community of fintech talents looking for their next roles - open for employers to look through. If there is any other way that we can help, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us!

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October is an important month for China if you know what I mean! It’ll be interesting to see how the 20th Communist Party Congress will impact the country’s economic and foreign investment policies. If you have any thoughts, please let me know!

Now please find October’s Chinese fintech news in the below. Enjoy the read!

Yours,

Ning

News

• China’s digital economy continues to make progress with digital RMB transaction volume breaching 100B Yuan threshold and Shenzhen listing its first digital economy ETF. Hong Kong also announced different digital asset policies from China mainland with the intention to win back the role of international digital hub. What I am more interested in is how will China truly strike the balance between privacy protection and government’s data supervision, and if this would interfere with Hong Kong’s ambition.
• China’s big 5 brokerages announced plans to support the real economy and tech innovation following the 20th National Communist Congress.
• PBOC released new fintech ethical guidelines to better demarcate the relationship between the Chinese tech sector and domestic financial institutions.
• PBOC calls for creation of social credit system that covers all of society.

Venture Financing

• Airwallex raised $100M at a $5.5B valuation in series E extension.
• Payments provider Lianlian Global acquired minority stake in AI content generator ContentBot to provide more value-add services to its users.

Product Launches

• HK-based fintech unicorn WeLab, together with its partner Astra International, is looking to launch digital bank in Indonesia next year.
• TikTok plans to launch live shopping in the US.
• Tencent’s WeChat launches palm print enabled payment mini program (Pay with your palm is coming!).
• Alipay tests a new function to allow fund transfer to Wepay.
• Payments provider PingPong Payments launches integrated solutions with Fedex to reduce logistic costs and service friction.
• Lianlian Global enters exclusive partnership with FundPark to provide cost-effective financing solutions “Suiyiyong” to cross-border merchants.

Interesting Read

• Research of China’s dialects and peer-to-peer lending shows that linguistic discrimation exists and it will impact individual’s access to finance.