**The financial work conference proposed to "do a good job in science and technology finance, green finance, inclusive finance, pension finance, and digital finance". "Digital finance" was written into the ** document for the first time, and its importance is becoming increasingly prominent. The financial industry is undergoing an unprecedented transformation, driven by technologies such as big data, blockchain, and artificial intelligence, digital finance is subverting the traditional financial form.
What is Digital Finance?What is the current status of the development of digital finance in China?How can digital finance better serve high-quality development?In the view of industry experts, the goal of developing digital finance is to better serve the real economy, although digital finance has developed rapidly in recent years, it also faces many difficulties and blockages, and it is necessary to work together to break through the difficulties and unblock the blockages, and promote the continuous upgrading of digital finance.
"Fusion of numbers and realities" is an intrinsic requirement.
What is Digital Finance?Huang Yiping, deputy dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, believes that digital finance refers to a new financial format that combines digital technology with traditional finance, including technology companies providing technical support for financial businesses, processes and products, and traditional financial institutions using digital technology to improve financial services.
In recent years, the rapid development of the digital economy has also become an important opportunity for the development of digital finance. According to a recent research report released by Industrial Research, digital finance is actually a reflection of the digital economy in the financial field, and the development of digital finance is an inevitable requirement for the digital transformation of the financial service economy and society. The report mentions that from a broad point of view, digital finance should be an inclusive concept, mainly including three aspects: first, at the level of resource utilization, the key development of the value of data elements;The second is the in-depth application of financial technology in the financial system at the level of technology applicationThird, at the level of business model, comprehensive innovation of digital financial business models and channels.
Financial institutions have also given their own understanding of digital finance. Xin Shuren, Secretary of the Party Committee and Chairman of Hengfeng Bank, said that digital finance is the "bloodline" of the digital economy, including three connotations. First of all, data elements are the underlying genes of digital finance, and financial institutions fully "decode" the value of data "genes" and release the productivity of data elements, which is the due meaning and inevitable choice of high-quality development of digital finance. Secondly, digital technology is the neural network of digital finance, which is reconstructing the service mode, operation mode and industry paradigm of the financial system, and has become a key measure for the development of digital finance. Thirdly, digital finance is a booster to serve the real economy, which can reduce service costs, reduce information asymmetry, continuously improve the efficiency of financial services, enhance the political and people's nature of financial services, and comprehensively improve the quality and efficiency of financial services for the real economy.
At present, although there is no unified definition of digital finance, all parties have reached a preliminary consensus on its basic components: First, the participants of digital finance include not only traditional financial institutions, but also digital platform enterprises, fintech companies and other entities;Second, it mainly relies on digital technology, digital channels and digital infrastructure to realize the supply of financial products and servicesThird, it includes the promotion of digital innovation in financial products and services, business processes, business models, etc.
Fan Wenzhong, chairman of Beijing Financial Holding Group, believes that in the future, two new trends in the development of digital finance deserve great attention and active promotion: one is the assetization of digital, and the other is the intelligence of finance. Fan Wenzhong believes that although data, as a core element resource, has universal use value, its asset attributes have not been fully reflected. Only after the confirmation, circulation and transaction of rights can data be transformed from a social resource into a quantifiable digital asset, and then evolve into productive digital capital through financial innovation, truly releasing its intrinsic value.
It is reported that the Beijing International Big Data Exchange, a subsidiary of Beijing Financial Holding Group, is actively promoting the pilot of enterprise data confirmation innovation of municipal state-owned enterprises, and strives to create a number of demonstration models and data innovation application scenarios through pilot trials.
Data and computing power are key.
The development of digital finance will have a profound impact on the financial industry. At present, a large number of financial institutions are still relying on branches to acquire customers and rely on professional staff to provide investment and banking services. According to the analysis of industry insiders, with the help of digital finance, the competitiveness of financial institutions in the future will not lie in the scale of assets, the number of branches and the number of financial practitioners, but on the scale of financial databases and the strength of corresponding computing power.
At present, the development of large AI models still needs to break through two major bottlenecks - data and computing power. Hai Zhou, vice president of carbon neutrality business of Yingtou Information Technology (Shanghai)**, said that in reality, the availability of some data is very poor, including some data related to green finance. "Because the data disclosed by companies is nowhere near enough. Most companies retain the data they disclose due to a variety of factors. Haizhou believes that if only a dozen or twenty enterprises are counted, banks can conduct door-to-door surveys one by one, but for hundreds of enterprises, and even more than 100,000 enterprises related to the green finance business of some banks. When faced with the size of a company, it is not feasible to send a questionnaire to each company and ask them to report their own carbon data. In this case, only with the help of large model algorithms can financial institutions achieve large-scale, efficient, and more accurate credit delivery.
Take, for example, sustainable finance data. Liu Xiangfeng, founder and CEO of Beijing Zhiding Technology, analyzed that the scope of sustainable finance data is large, the processing cost is high, and the combination of automatic processing and manual processing based on a large number of artificial intelligence technologies can greatly improve the processing efficiency and accuracy of sustainable finance data.
Industry insiders believe that in order to support the application of financial technology such as distributed architecture, big data, and artificial intelligence, many financial institutions currently have a corresponding computing power foundation. However, for the training of generative AI, the computing power reserves of financial institutions are far from sufficient, and in view of the huge cost of developing computing power centers and the fact that financial institutions mostly use external procurement large models for generative AI implementation, the construction of computing power of financial institutions in the future still needs to be invested.
In addition, due to the wide distribution of datasets used for AI model training and uneven quality, the raw data needs to be cleaned and processed many times, and the training process also needs to be manually identified and calibrated, which needs to be completed by professionals. Although there is a large amount of data, it is still difficult to meet the requirements of model training in terms of the quality of the identity database. Industry experts suggest that relevant departments need to plan special funds and formulate guiding policies as soon as possible, and pay close attention to supporting the development of related industries to help the development of artificial intelligence.
Enhance digital supervision capabilities.
The rapid development of digital finance will also bring some new forms of risk. Fei Binjie, the founder of Beijing Entropy Technology Co., Ltd., told reporters that large language models have subverted many people's imagination of the boundaries of artificial intelligence capabilities, but they also bring corresponding risks that need to be improved. "There are problems of illusion and lack of reliability in large models, and the effective combination of financial large models and investment research must be based on more data of the whole financial industry. Fei Binjie said.
The digital transformation of digital finance includes not only the digital transformation of financial institutions, but also the improvement of the digital supervision capabilities of financial regulators. Xin Shuren believes that the development of digital finance should adhere to the overall development and security. It is necessary not only to improve data security protection capabilities based on the data itself, but also to strengthen risk prevention and control of new digital products, new models, and new models, and accelerate the improvement of the risk management system.
For supervision, Huang Yiping believes that the rapid development of digital finance has brought many new characteristics to the formation, form and spread of financial risks, and the traditional mode of separate supervision and institutional supervision is difficult to effectively supervise in an all-round way, so supervision needs to achieve full coverage as much as possible, and innovate regulatory means with the times.
It is worth noting that under the "Regulatory Sandbox" pilot mechanism for fintech innovation supervision, many financial institutions have previously carried out some exploration and application of fintech. As of September 2023, the pilot scope has been expanded to 26 provinces, with a total of 167 sandbox pilots. The Beijing Operation and Management Department, which was the first to start the pilot, has released a total of 5 batches of 26 regulatory sandbox projects, of which 6 regulatory sandbox applications have completed the full-process closed-loop verification. It is understood that at present, the regulatory sandbox applied by China's financial institutions is mainly focused on innovative applications in the fields of big data, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and privacy computing.
Industry experts believe that the next step is to speed up the construction of a regulatory big data platform, make full use of scientific and technological means, quickly and effectively identify and accurately lock financial risks, and firmly guard the bottom line of no systemic risks while promoting financial business innovation. (Economic ** reporter Lu Min).