IMI-Hande Fintech Salon (No. 4): Fintech is Leading the Revolution of Payment System
2017-03-03 IMI
The topics covered fintech and new financial revolution, the impact of new technologies on the payment and clearing system, digital currency, and so on. Yang Tao pointed out that payment is not just a public financial infrastructure. It has gradually become part of the business model and a new means of marketing in recent years. Although more new players have entered the payment market using their own comparative advantage, original players have not been repulsed. Rather, they have returned to the market through technical cooperation and business cooperation and so on. The market competition is far from over.
Yang Tao believed that the motivations of applying block chain in the payment system are the fact that it reduces complexity, improves efficiency of end-to-end transaction and availability of asset and fund, reduces transaction costs of multiple transaction holders, improves transparency and invariance of transaction records, increases network flexibility through distributed data management, reduces operational and financial risks and so on.
In terms of the digital currency, Yang Tao argued that the concept of digital money is vague, and it is not uncommon. Due to the rapid development and lack of theoretical support, countries are facing similar problems when implementing policies. The concepts of digital money, electronic payment, financial technology and other dazzling concept were often tangled up together, whether it is in developed economies such as Europe and the US, or developing countries. These concepts are so vague that even regulators could not sort them out. At the same time, in recent years, countries have begun to pay more attention to new technologies to improve the efficiency and security of the national payment system, thus boosting economic and social development. In this context, digital money and related technologies are also often categorized as payment innovation, attracting a higher attention from policy makers. He pointed out that monetary system and currency issuance in the future may be a compromise between centralization and decentralization. The central bank are likely to conduct “quasi-legal digital currency” experiments for the purpose of value determination, exchange and clearing in closed or semi-public scenes, in the asset market rather than the money market, in the form of local area network, alliance chain or private chain.
