Alibaba's Yu'E Bao slammed at Boao Forum
- By Wu Jin
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E-mail China.org.cn, April 10, 2014
Yu'E Bao, an online wealth management product, received a barrage of criticism at the Boao Forum for Asia annual Conference, a forum attended by high-level government officials, businessmen and members of the academia.
Yu'E Bao allows users gain interest and transfer money freely using a cell phone without restrictions on the time and amount.
"Stop the revolution Ma Yun, because you don't have that ability," said Dong Wenbiao, CEO of China Minsheng Bank, the first bank in China owned in a majority by non-state-owned enterprises.
Ma is the founder of Alibaba, a third-party e-commerce website in China, which cooperated with Tianhong Fund last year to launch the service. It has proved to be a success, as Yu'E Bao drew 2.5 million customers and raised 6.6 billion yuan (US$1.06 billion) in the first 18 days.
However, China's Central Bank intends to rein in on business and other virtual online payment services, such as those that involve code scanning, by setting a 10,000 yuan limit on personal online transactions annually, saying that it was highly concerned with the online security of individual users.
The circular, which was issued only a few days after Premier Li Keqiang vowed to give government support to the growing Internet-based banking services in his recent government report last month, is now soliciting public opinions.
According to Dong, although Yu'E Bao has affected the business of Minsheng Bank, the impact has been limited. "It is an exaggeration to say that [the banks] will die out like dinosaurs," Dong said. "No matter how the Internet develops, face to face communication will always be the mainstream."
Chen Zhiwu, a professor from Yale University said, "E-finance is taking advantage of the loopholes in the regulatory system. Its success was not unexpected."
According to Chen, the ramification of the online financial business is hard to predict once there are problems with fluidity in the market.
Yan Qingmin, a panelist from the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), said the government needs to launch a series of fundamental supervisory policies to ensure the fairness of the market.
The Boao Forum, which is being held from April 8 to 11, in China's southern Hainan Province, has held many panel discussions on Asia's development.
