On November 15, China Soft Capital and Hanhua Financial Holding signed a cooperation agreement in Beijing to jointly promote the business of inclusive finance and technology finance. They planned to jointly launch a Fintech fund with a scale of RMB 10 billion, focusing on investment in Fintech innovation and boosting the development of new real economy with digital inclusive finance.

As reported, Hanhua Financial Holdings is a leading enterprise of inclusive finance in China. It has a number of business sectors, such as banking, financing assurance, and asset management, and has served more than 200,000 micro, small and medium-sized real enterprises in total. Mr. Zhang Guoxiang, Chairman of Hanhua Financial Holding, said that the rapid Fintech development would be conducive to expanding the application scenarios of financial products, upgrading risk management tools, reducing transaction costs, and promoting inclusive finance to serve a wider range of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. Hanhua Financial Holding hoped to invest in Fintech enterprises to construct a comprehensive service platform for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises and gather more social capital to invest in inclusive finance.

Mr. Wang Guangyu, Chairman of China Soft Capital, pointed out that Fintech was a financial innovation brought about by new technologies, and its foothold lied in technologies. Fintech can create new business models, applications, processes or products, thus exerting a significant impact on financial market, financial institutions and supply modes of financial services. At present, Fintech has developed from the Era 1.0 to the Era 4.0, and from "IT + finance" to inclusive finance. It is the original intention of the two parties to jointly launch the Fintech fund to make Fintech inclusive and solve more user needs on the premise of regulatory compliance.

Mr. Wang Guangyu also pointed out that Fintech was growing at double-digit rates every year and the financial service industry was being restructured, with a number of unicorn companies to emerge in the future. China is becoming a hot spot for Fintech investment. From 2011 to 2017, there was about USD 90 billion invested in the Fintech industry around the world. The financing frequency and amount in China accounted for almost half of the total. As representatives of China's new four new great inventions, Alipay and WeChat Pay have been at the forefront of internationalization. China Soft Capital hoped that this Fintech fund would help more Fintech enterprises in China grow rapidly through this Fintech Fund and plan their future business development with an international perspective as early as possible.

Mr. Liu Yong, Director of Zhongguancun Internet Finance Research Institute, believed that local governments represented by Beijing were making great efforts to promote the development planning of Fintech, and activates and fosters Fintech at the industrial level. The investment by the fund of RMB 10 billion will help to accelerate the cultivation of unicorns' enterprises in the Fintech sector, and promote the rapid application of new technologies, products or business models, thereby promoting the rapid development of the entire industry.

At the signing ceremony, Mr. Jiang Pengcheng, Chairman of China Soft Capital, and Cui Weilan, Chairman of Hanhua Financial Holding, signed a cooperation agreement on behalf of both parties. It is reported that the two parties also expressed their willingness to cooperate in constructing an industry-finance platform, cooperate with local governments to promote the Fintech industry, and jointly build an ecosystem for the coordinated development of financial industry.