, Columnist
Fintech Flip-Flop
China is championing fintech on the one hand and demonizing it on the other.
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Few words fill banks with more dread these days than fintech, the growing bevy of unregulated upstarts mucking about in their business patch. In China, where lenders have quite enough on their plates, they must be feeling positively schizophrenic.
On the one hand, Beijing is cracking down on peer-to-peer lenders and crowdfunding operators. On the other, authorities are letting the payment platforms of tech giants Alibaba and Tencent raise more money. Lufax in January completed a fundraising round that values it at $18.5 billion.