The financial sector is seeing major changes in China as a result of the internet. As tech hedge fund manager Richard Ji of All-Stars Investments said, “In the past, it was only the princelings that had early access to opportunities. Now ordinary people do too.”
One example offered by the Financial Times is China Renaissance with Bao Fan. His clients are tech entrepreneurs and his company is a merchant bank which invests in and provides securities services to new economy groups.
As FT said, “Indeed, companies such as Alibaba and Tencent are doing more than any edicts from Beijing to transform how finance is done in China. These technology firms are collecting money from their customers and placing it in money market funds that can command high rates because of the volume. Less than a year after it started taking deposits, one single online money market fund – Alibaba’s Yu’e Bao (“Leftover Treasure” in Chinese) now has more depositors than the total number of equity investors in China. They are also disrupting the traditional (and under-developed) bank payment systems, and killing the fees the banks have gleaned from such services.”
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