Digital financial revolution in China

For the public in much of the world, “digital finance” has come to mean the Wild West explosion of cryptocurrencies and similar lightly regulated technologies. But in China, digital finance rapidly has become the principle route for providing financial services to hundreds of millions of people, notably low-income families and small businesses that were underserved by the traditional banking sector. In this book, thirteen experts—ten of whom are affiliated with the prestigious Peking University in Beijing—analyze the astonishing growth of digital financial services in China and draw policy conclusions, both for China itself and for the broader world. While the United States and the United Kingdom initially dominated the world of digital finance, China now is the world leader in the numbers of customers and transactions. That’s not just because China has so many people: China has become a world leader in “financial inclusion”—using digital technologies to provide banking services to the disadvantaged, especially in rural areas, who lacked such services in the past. This book examines the factors behind the rapid growth of digital finance in China and documents both its successes and failures. It also analyzes the implications, both domestically and internationally, of China’s moves into digital finance, and it assesses the state of regulatory policy. Readers will learn how China’s experience in digital finance inevitably will affect how the new marriage of technology and financial services develops in the rest of the world.