Under the background of the new round of scientific and technological revolution and the accelerated evolution of industrial transformation, the deep integration of "technology-industry-finance" and the construction of a competitive modern industrial system have become the only way to achieve high-quality development. While constantly increasing technological innovation, the financial industry is also exploring the practical path of its own new quality productivity. In recent years, the vigorous rise of new technologies such as artificial intelligence is bringing subversive changes to the financial industry.
Financial living water nourishes new quality productivity
Recently, a series of policy documents have been issued intensively to promote the financial industry to support the cultivation of new quality productivity from various angles.
In April, the General Administration of Financial Supervision, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission jointly issued the Notice on Deepening Manufacturing Financial Services to Help Promote New Industrialization. The document clearly stated that banking and insurance institutions should implement the innovation-driven development strategy in depth and help promote the development of new quality productivity.
In May, the General Administration of Financial Supervision issued "Guiding Opinions on Doing Five Big Articles in Banking and Insurance Industry" (hereinafter referred to as "Guiding Opinions"), aiming at thoroughly implementing the decision-making arrangements of the Central Financial Work Conference on doing five big articles in technology and finance, green finance, inclusive finance, pension finance and digital finance. Under the overall guidance of the Central Financial Committee, around the development of new quality productivity, the financial "five big articles" will be effectively implemented.
As the first of the "five great articles" in finance, technology and finance refers to the financial system serving science and technology enterprises. By integrating financial resources such as credit, bonds and equity, it provides financing for science and technology enterprises in line with their life cycle, realizes the effective docking of financial resources and science and technology resources, stimulates the scientific research vitality of enterprises, and promotes the industrialization of science and technology, which has become a necessary driving force for the development of science and technology enterprises. The Guiding Opinions emphasizes that it is necessary to focus on blocking points to improve the quality and efficiency of technology and finance, and provide full-life financial services for technology-based enterprises in combination with the development laws and characteristics of technology-based enterprises.
At the local level, the financial departments of Jiangsu, Henan, Shaanxi, Xinjiang, Anhui and other provinces have recently issued guidance documents related to supporting the development of new quality productive forces.
Recently, Xin Guobin, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, revealed that the special roadshow of "Financial Integration of Science and Technology Industry" held in Zhengding, Shijiazhuang, and the exchange activities for the third anniversary of the launch of the national platform for industrial integration in 2024 was an innovative exploration of industrial integration. In the three years since its launch, the platform has helped enterprises to raise more than 830 billion yuan, put more than 290,000 high-quality enterprises in storage and settled in more than 2,400 financial institutions.
According to reports, the "financial integration of science and technology industry" project will be implemented by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in conjunction with the stock exchange and various investment institutions from 2021, guiding all kinds of capital to invest in early, small and hard technology, and building a sustained and stable innovation investment mechanism to improve the transformation and industrialization of scientific and technological achievements. In the same year, the National Industry-Industry Integration Platform was launched, which is a non-profit public service platform based on the data resources of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and related units. Through this platform, a financial cooperation mechanism for science and technology industry was established to help promote the deep integration of science and technology innovation and industrial innovation.
The insiders believe that the new quality productivity is marked by a substantial increase in total factor productivity, characterized by innovation, the key lies in high quality and the essence is advanced productivity. Scientific research and transformation of scientific and technological achievements are inseparable from financial support. Promote finance to better serve scientific and technological innovation, do a good job in technology and finance’s great article, and realize mutual promotion and empowerment of science and technology and finance, so as to better help accelerate the formation of new quality productivity and strongly promote high-quality development.
Financial technology accelerates innovation iteration
While the living water of finance constantly nourishes the new quality productivity, the new quality productivity of the financial industry itself is gradually emerging. With the rapid development of financial technology, on the one hand, financial institutions consolidate their digital basic capabilities, build a safe, compliant and unified technical platform base based on digital technologies such as big data, cloud computing and blockchain, on the other hand, they continue to innovate digital services, continuously optimize digital service processes, accelerate the innovation and iteration of digital financial products, and activate new functions of financial services.
Yang Xiaojing, a special expert in Beijing, said that financial technology in a broad sense refers to innovations brought by various technologies that can affect and change the way financial markets, financial institutions or financial services are provided. China’s financial technology ranks first in the world, especially in mobile payment. According to the general situation of the payment system in 2023 released by the People’s Bank of China, in 2023, the bank handled 296.163 billion electronic payment services, amounting to 3,395.27 trillion yuan, of which the total amount of mobile payment services reached 555 trillion yuan, up 11.15% year-on-year. In March this year, Z/Yen Group, a British think tank, and China (Shenzhen) Comprehensive Development Research Institute jointly released the 35th Global Financial Center Index Report (GFCI 35), which showed that Shenzhen continued to rank fourth in the world in terms of the level of financial technology development, second only to new york, London and San Francisco.
"Due to the technological progress and rise driven by a strong consumer market, massive user demand has provided a large number of business scenarios and business models. China has always been one of the largest financial technology markets in the world. We are leading the world in the development of mobile payment, financial anti-fraud and identity recognition, and consumer finance. Enterprises, talents and technologies in related fields are also actively’ going out’ to operate and integrate into and influence the global industrial chain." Yang Xiaojing said.
With the accelerated iterative upgrade of artificial intelligence (AI) technology represented by big model, this highly penetrating and subversive technology is also transforming and reshaping the financial industry. As a number of international and domestic patent inventors related to Internet finance and big data applications, Yang Xiaojing’s work experience just witnessed the three stages of the development of AI technology in the financial industry. According to her, from 2010 to 2014, AI was mainly used for analysis and statistics, and the company she founded used relevant technologies to help asset management institutions conduct performance and transaction analysis; From 2015 to 2020, the massive unstructured data on the Internet (including map spatio-temporal data) provided a foundation for machine learning, and AI could be used to find new investment factors, and the industry innovation of Baidu and other Internet companies cooperating with asset management institutions to issue big data funds emerged; After 2020, the emergence of applications focuses on the superposition of exclusive knowledge in the financial field with large models, and agents (agents) are used to carry intelligent investment and intelligent customer service, thus truly replacing some productivity.
"The American OpenAI Research Center (OpenAI) regards finance as the first choice for technology landing. First, it cooperated with Morgan Stanley to launch a robot investment consultant based on GPT-4, and after the release of GPT-4o on May 14, it cooperated with Reddit, a well-known American forum and US retail base camp, which enabled OpenAI to use community content to train models and aroused widespread concern in the capital market." Yang Xiaojing introduced that from the perspective of domestic layout, many banks such as Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Agricultural Bank of China have launched self-developed large-scale model platforms to assist intelligent risk control and intelligent operation, and some Internet securities platforms for individual users, such as Oriental Fortune and Straight Flush, have also filed in the network information office and released a large model of financial dialogue.
Preventing and controlling risks and promoting scientific and technological innovation better
The insiders believe that it is one of the core driving forces of new quality productivity to incite scientific and technological innovation with financial innovation and promote the development of production methods in a more intelligent, efficient, green and safe direction. However, in the process of financial scientific and technological innovation, controlling the balance between it and risk prevention and control, value efficiency and resource input is the pain and difficulty for the financial industry to develop new quality productivity.
"In the first stage of the development of the financial model, the supervision was perfect and the business coverage was rich. The suppliers of technologies from banking, insurance to securities were also highly motivated and the application results were remarkable." Yang Xiaojing told reporters, but there are also shortcomings and hidden concerns. For example, core technologies and applications such as large models actually come from breakthroughs in basic knowledge and theory. In this respect, China’s ecological support and long-term investment are not complete enough. In addition, personnel training in related fields has just started. These two shortcomings are related to whether it can continue to lead, and it is urgent to attract attention.
More importantly, the financial industry has very high requirements for risk management and safety, and needs to pay close attention to three key points: model risk supervision, consumption safety and ethical governance. First of all, model risk needs technical application norms and supervision. Large-scale model has complex structure and many parameters, so it faces challenges in interpretability and security. For example, the model should give a fair, transparent and safe conclusion, otherwise it will cause technical trust risk.
Secondly, safe usage is very important. Financial data contains high-value and highly sensitive information. For example, the cross-border financial scenario contains users’ personal privacy information, enterprise information and economic activity information, and it is necessary to strictly abide by the Regulations on the Supervision and Administration of Non-bank Payment Institutions to use the data. For example, at the outflow end, payment institutions should try their best to ensure the "minimum necessity" of sharing personal information. Although it will bring some problems such as poor results of large models in the short term, in the long run, data development and flow under a unified standard can achieve long-term stability, continuously improve the service level of the industry and promote business innovation.
Third, ethical governance and accountability should be strengthened. The financial field requires rigor, but the big model has the illusion of intelligence. For example, in the securities market, the big financial model makes false and misleading investment services for individual investors, which will cause serious economic losses. Can the algorithm be held accountable if it causes property losses? These problems should be prepared in advance and clarified in advance.
"Throughout history, every industrial revolution begins with scientific and technological innovation, ends with financial innovation, and thrives on industrial innovation. Financial innovation draws new technologies into the industrial system continuously, and promotes leap-forward changes in the industry." In the aforementioned activities, Xin Guobin said that the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation is developing in depth, and it is necessary to profoundly grasp the basic laws of promoting new industrialization in the new era, constantly promote financial innovation to adapt to the transformation of scientific and technological achievements and industrialization needs, cultivate and develop new quality productivity according to local conditions, and accelerate the construction of a modern industrial system led by scientific and technological innovation and supported by advanced manufacturing. (Reporter Wu Wei)
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