Internet finance in China 中国互联网金融

Foe or frenemy?
是敌人还是亦敌亦友？

China’s giant banks are under attack
中国大型银行面临挑战

Mar 1st 2014 | SHANGHAI | From the print edition

COULD internet-finance entrepreneurs upend China’s banking sector? The notion seems preposterous. After all, China is home to the world’s biggest banks. Its financial sector is heavily regulated, making life difficult for disruptive innovators. Yet these same goliaths are now under attack from online funds that are offering returns that are 15 times higher than those allowed on conventional deposit accounts at regulated banks.

互联网金融企业能否颠覆中国银行业？这种想法似乎有些荒唐，毕竟中国拥有全球最大的银行，其金融行业监管严格，颠覆性创新企业很难生存。但是这是这些大型银行现在正面临着网上基金的挑战，这种网上基金的回报率是受管制银行中传统储蓄账户的16倍。

China’s cap on deposit rates at banks is causing money to flood into shadow-banking products such as those offered by “trust” companies in search of higher yields. Offerings by internet firms, with their large existing customer bases, have opened the spigots wider.

中国的银行存款利率上限令资金涌向＂信托＂公司等提供的影子银行产品以寻求较高的收益。 而由互联网提供的产品，再加上互联网企业本身所拥有的客户基础，就使这种形式更受欢迎了。

Alibaba, an e-commerce firm, led the charge with Yu’e Bao (“remnant treasure”), which allows customers to invest money parked in their accounts at Alipay, its online-payment service. Though launched only last June, it has already attracted some 400 billion yuan ($65 billion). Baidu, an online search firm, and Tencent, which makes online games, have also since entered the fray.

电商阿里巴巴旗下经营的余额宝（意为“剩余的财富”）允许客户用其在线支付系统支付宝账户的钱进行投资。虽然余额宝去年六月才兴起，却已经吸引资金高达4000亿人民币（合650亿美元）。在线搜索引擎百度以及在线游戏开发商腾讯也已加入了这场竞争中。

Some see these online firms as a serious long-term threat to banks and the government’s ability to control the financial sector, prompting noisy demands (mostly by banks) to regulate the upstarts. Regulators have not yet expressed a clear view, but some observers see signals of a looming regulatory crackdown in attacks by the official media; a financial editor on the state-run television network recently branded online financial firms vampires and parasites.

有些人认为这些互联网企业会长期成为实体银行以及政府金融业监管能力的威胁，这就使得要求监管这些新兴企业的呼声日益高涨（大多来自银行）。监管部门还没有对此作出明确答复，但是某些评论人士表示有对官方媒体攻击互联网金融业的行为进行强力压制的迹象；一位国有广播电视公司的金融编辑人员最近就贬低这些互联网企业是吸血鬼和寄生虫。

Online funds are indeed hurting the banks. For one thing, they are sucking away money: banking deposits fell by one trillion yuan in January. May Yan of Barclays observes that the internet firms use their deposits mostly to lend money at high rates to banks that are facing a squeeze on deposits.

在线基金确实对实体银行造成伤害。首先，它们不断吸钱：导致银行储蓄金额一月份下1万亿元。巴克莱银行的严梅表示互联网企业储蓄金的主要用途是以高利率借给那些储蓄金额吃紧的实体银行。

So will this lead to massive disruption of the sector? Possibly, but Ms Yan thinks not. Though growing fast, as a share of total banking deposits the internet firms’ are minnows today. UBS, an investment bank, calculates that even if a tenth of bank deposits flee to online products (a heroic assumption), it might cut the net interest margin at banks by just 0.1%. China’s conservative regulators may well clamp down if the upstarts become big enough to pose systemic risks.

那么这种企业的存在会导致银行业陷入混乱吗？很有可能，但严女士并不这么认为。虽然互联网金融业发展迅速，但其储蓄金额所占比重仍很少，它们现在还只是小企业而已。瑞士联合银行统计出即使十分之一的银行储蓄金流向在线产品（这只是一种大胆估计），银行净利差也只可能减少0.1%。中国监管部门一向保守，很有可能会在这些新兴企业实力过大时对其进行限制，以避免系统性风险。