采访视频链接：http://english.cntv.cn/2015/07/22/VIDE1437541326641517.shtml
1. What are the prospects of Internet Finance? We have seen in the past twenty years the process of “internetization”, trying to connect everything to the Internet. In a sense, the process is also moving in the reverse direction now: bringing what only exists online to our offline world. For example, electronic payment such as bitcoins are accepted in many countries to allow us to buy coffee so to speak. For Internet finance, the bottleneck has been security. A lot of so-called new ideas today were already there twenty years ago. It was Alipay and WePay among others who provided the last straw that broke the camel’s back. It was like flooding that O2O started to flourish.
Internet finance is finance in nature. To help the economy, it must provide the most basic functions: to help with liquidity, to lubricate transactions, and to set the right price for us to decide to consume or save today. On the other hand, the so-called real economy firms today are already putting one leg into the e-commerce area. Giants like Gree, that has close to 200 bil revenue per year by selling air conditioners alone, is already moving to produce also mobile phones so that the home appliances could be controlled through the Internet. We should watch closely how it develops for the giants of the traditional firms and learn from their experiences of success and failures.
The IT infrastructure and market in China are already at the very top of the world. The biggest challenge I am seeing is talents. The education system in China is not providing talents that understand IT, economics and law at the same time. Our universities are too rigid in design. We should learn from the success stories of the i-School movement in the world led by universities such as Berkeley, Michigan, and Carnegie Mellon. The IT and communication departments in the US are moving out of the traditional schools to merge with social sciences so that IT problems could be tackled in a more holistic approach. |
