-Xin Finance
Hong Ruoxin,/Wen
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At the beginning of 2003, Bezos, the founder of Amazon, fell in love with a book called Creation: Life and How to Create. The author steve grand was the developer of the video game "Biology" in 1990s.
This game is similar to the later popular "cultivation" series, allowing players to cultivate their own "intelligent creatures" on the computer. Grande summed up the significance of creating "intelligent creatures": focusing on designing simple computing components-primitives, and then waiting for those strange behaviors to appear.
Although the content of Creation is a little rough and difficult to understand, it does not prevent it from becoming popular within Amazon. Because there was a heated debate within the company about whether to build an Internet "infrastructure".
According to Grande, no matter how complex the intelligent system is, it is also built from the bottom by countless small devices and codes like building blocks, and finally forms an organic organism, which is constantly iterative and evolving. This view inspired Bezos and promoted the development of Amazon Cloud.
Everyone knows the following story, just as Bill Gates seized the dividend of the personal computer revolution and let Microsoft lead the whole PC era. Bezos foresees the future of "big data explosion": every enterprise will need flexible storage and computing power, and the emergence of cloud services has completely changed the computing economy.
Therefore, in addition to extraordinary vision, the essence of achieving a great enterprise is more important to become a commercial infrastructure.
At present, the rapid development of digital economy is reshaping all industries. With the development of 5G, technologies such as Internet of Things, cloud computing and big data will become more mature, and the integration with business will continue to deepen. So in the future, what else can become an important lubricant and accelerator for new business?
Perhaps financial technology is one of the answers.
Recently, at the first Science and Technology Open Day with the theme of 360, Zhang Jiaxing, the chief scientist, mentioned that every company needs financial technology services in the future. Can improve the efficiency of enterprises, enhance user stickiness, and then make enterprises more competitive in the market.
In fact, financial technology has long been recognized as a commercial infrastructure, especially in the United States. From the supermarket giant Wal-Mart to the logistics giant American Express, they can provide financial services for users. With the help of technology, enterprises have crossed the cycle and become the king of the business world.
Looking back at China, in the past few years, with the advent of the mobile Internet era, the application of new technologies has promoted the evolution of new economy and new finance. A number of financial technology companies, such as several financial technology giants that have been listed and will be listed soon, have gone through the test of commercial market and development cycle.
If the rise of these industry giants is to seize the opportunity of China's transition from PC to mobile Internet, and have completed the forging of business model and core competence in the past few years; So now, there is no doubt that a new market "turning point" has been ushered in.
Zhang Jiaxing mentioned that in the practice of 360 theme in the past few years, he felt a huge market gap.
Such as various scenes, retail, medical care, manufacturing and so on. All are accelerating digital transformation and upgrading, and financial technology is increasingly appearing in B-side itself and external C-side services.
There are also a large number of financial institutions, which have increased the intensity and depth of the application of financial technology. Even regard it as the key driving force for the next strategic transformation. Especially after the epidemic this year, "non-contact" finance has become the mainstream trend.
In fact, finance has long been regarded as the "blood" of social and economic life, and the core of financial technology is to use technology to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of financial services. When it is more closely integrated with the business, it will inevitably become an infrastructure that can provide more efficient services.
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We can also look at it from another angle: why can financial technology become the infrastructure of business?
In recent years, "entropy reduction" has become a network celebrity word in enterprise development and management. It originates from the physical concept-the law of entropy increase, also known as the second law of thermodynamics: all spontaneous processes always develop in the direction of entropy increase.
Entropy is used in physics to calculate the degree of chaos in a system. Therefore, we can simply understand that in a closed system, as big as the universe and countries, as small as enterprises and individuals, in the process of natural development without external interference, they will eventually enter a disorderly state and even eventually go to destruction.
Taking enterprise development as an example, "entropy increase" is considered as an inevitable trend.
Due to the expansion of business scale, the complexity of management also increases, and the marginal income often begins to decrease; Coupled with external technological progress, the emergence of new business models, the law of industrial cycle and other factors, it will pose a continuous threat to enterprises, and finally it will be manifested as "the failure of the function of creating value for enterprises."
This is also why this concept will be introduced into the field of modern management and praised by many entrepreneurs.
Ren, the founder of Huawei, has repeatedly cited this concept as the driving force for Huawei to continuously promote open innovation, including optimizing organizational structure management and increasing investment structure. In the final analysis, it is to fight against "entropy increase" and realize "entropy decrease".
This is still true for a company, especially for an industry. Wu Haisheng, CEO of 360 Mathematics Department, also mentioned in the sharing that the financial industry needs to fight against "entropy increase" more than many other traditional industries.
For example, he said that the financial industry is an existence with strong wealth creation ability, and wealth itself is easy to bring corruption and other problems to enterprises. For another example, the financial industry holds a huge amount of data that other companies dare not expect. Today, when data becomes a new "wealth password", improper management and application of data will bring unimaginable disastrous consequences.
In addition, financial institutions have huge offline outlets and teams, and a large financial institution has tens of thousands of employees, which may easily lead to inefficient management, redundant personnel and even business deformation. Today, with the acceleration of digital transformation, these problems have become particularly prominent.
A typical case is Wells Fargo, the king of American retail. In 20 16, a "fake account" scandal broke out-opening an account without the user's permission and charging illegally, which was eventually fined by the regulatory authorities, and also caused a great blow to the retail business.
In the process of resumption of trading, we can see the "entropy increase" challenge faced by financial enterprises-the previous "cross-selling" strategy is no longer effective, marginal benefits begin to decay, and employees gradually move towards disorder and chaos under the pressure of KPI.
Then, looking at today's financial industry, how should we fight against "entropy increase" and realize "entropy decrease"?
Wu Haisheng summed up several points in sharing:
One is "openness". He believes that the more open a company is, the more it can introduce new ideas and make itself more orderly. This is why Ren Zheng Fei and Bezos repeatedly mentioned "entropy reduction". Enterprises must break the closed system, constantly examine themselves and promote evolution and iteration.
Taking the most important application of artificial intelligence in financial technology as an example, data, algorithm and platform itself constitute a rolling "flywheel". Data derivation algorithm and empowerment platform have better ability to attract more users and thus generate more data.
In this process, the accumulation of data, the evolution of algorithms and the sharing of capabilities are difficult to be completely completed by an enterprise, especially in the era of mobile Internet. The speed of data growth and technology evolution is getting faster and faster, and enterprises need more cooperation and cooperation to make the "flywheel" turn faster and realize the evolution of capabilities.
The second is "technology". Enterprises can become stronger through "continuous technical investment and open forms".
We can also see that both traditional financial institutions and financial technology companies are increasing their investment in R&D, which is an irreversible development trend of the whole industry.
In fact, the two key words of technology and openness are the keys to precipitate the financial technology industry, thus expanding the reach, improving service efficiency and breaking the closed business ecology from the beginning, while the essence of connection and symbiosis further releases the energy of business.
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So, in practice, what is the role of financial technology in "entropy increase"?
As we all know, in the past few years, financial technology has brought an almost subversive change to the payment industry.
According to the data of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of the end of September 20 19, the total number of mobile Internet users in China was about15.98 million, and the number of users using mobile phones to surf the Internet was13.04 million. According to Ipsos' previous calculation, the penetration rate of third-party mobile payment among netizens is as high as 96.9%.
Undoubtedly, mobile payment has become the commercial infrastructure in China, which has greatly improved the payment efficiency, accelerated the process of financial online, and spawned a large number of new business models, thus accumulating a huge amount of data and further deepening the breadth and depth of financial technology applications.
Online lending is another typical case. Through the application of artificial intelligence, big data and other technologies, the development of internet loans has further "sunk" the service groups, and the people, scenes and product forms of loans have also undergone great changes.
Take 360 subjects as an example. In the past four years, it has served more than 65.438+0.5 billion users. Core employees 1000 people, and the annual GMV scale exceeds 200 billion. The rapid growth rate and the wide reach of people are unimaginable for traditional financial services.
The core of achieving this goal is to gradually apply AI technology to the whole process before, during and after lending.
For example, Argus risk control engine independently developed by 360 main body can automatically screen and monitor risk groups, make intelligent decisions, monitor loan risk changes in real time, evaluate user qualification changes, and realize intelligent collection and intelligent customer service through complicated risk control calculation of background data.
The data shows that Argus intercepted more than 65.438+0000 new risks for 360 subjects, the automatic over-inspection rate exceeded 99%, the guaranteed assets exceeded 70 billion, the daily average recovery loss was 65.438+00000, and the platform fraud loss rate was less than 0.2%.
On the basis of the continuous maturity of AI capabilities, 360 subjects open these capabilities to financial institutions, providing them with five solutions: digital marketing scheme, digital operation scheme, digital risk control scheme, digital post-lending scheme and intelligent financial full link scheme.
The second quarterly report of 360 main body in 2020 shows that the proportion of platform technology business has increased to 26.9%, and the proportion of comprehensive technical service income has approached 50%. Combined with the aforementioned AI flywheel, the trading and data accumulation under its open strategy make the flywheel of the platform run at high speed automatically.
In the future when digitalization becomes a daily life, every enterprise is striving to become a technology company, and every technology company has an AI brain. The accumulation of data and technology and the ability of financial technology companies to forge in the process of business development have also given them a bigger stage in the AI ? ? era.
Although the development of financial technology has been accompanied by many disputes and challenges, today, most people enjoy more convenient, efficient, flexible and even low-cost services in finance, which also proves that financial technology has the potential to change the whole business pattern.
No matter how it develops in the future, financial technology has left the deepest impression in the digital age.