Reform and Opening Up will Make China's Financial Sector More Competitive

The governor of the People's Bank of China recently asserted that openness and reform would be crucial to making China's financial sector more competitive in the world.

In a session on the Global Implications of China's Financial Reforms on the ongoing 11th Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, Jing Ulrich, managing director and vice-chairman for Asia-Pacific at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Hong Kong, agreed."China is very much opening banking, insurance and capital markets," she explained. "Competition will make Chinese companies more competitive." "How can we really learn from competitors?" asked Li Fuan, chairman of China Bohai Bank. "The only way is to open up." Chinese banks are already very open, asserted Li Daokui, dean of Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University. Banking regulators 10 years ago already allowed for foreign strategic investments in Chinese banks. .Eswar Prasad, professor at Cornell University pointed out that capital account opening as a catalyst for domestic reform is crucial. But it requires a bigger communications strategy.

"Leverage is not that high, but is growing at a rapid pace," Li Fuan reckoned. "It is very important to strengthen our regulations and that will keep us competitive." Ulrich added: "Fiscal reform is part of the deleveraging process."

For JP Rangaswami, chief data officer of Deutsche Bank of the U.K., "it all comes back to data. The cost of storage has come down and we are now better at storage." Artificial learning and intelligence are creating new ways for financial companies to harness the data and find useful new ways to engage with their customers.

Source: World Economic Forum