Peking University, April. 10, 2014: Hosted by the Graduate Association of Peking University, the Boya Culture Salon "What does the Future Hold in Store For Internet Finance" was held at the Yingjie overseas exchange center, Peking University on April 10.
Soul Htite，the founder of the Lending Club, and Guo Yuhang, the co-chief executive and co-founder of Dianrong visited PKU and introduced the mode of the Lending Club and Dianrong. They also explained the challenges and opportunities ahead of the innovative mode of Internet Finance and Peer to Peer (P2P) in China. Other representatives of Dianrong were present at the salon.
Ren Qingpeng, chairman of the Graduate Association, made a brief introduction of the Boya Culture Salon at the opening-up speech and pointed out the theme of the salon, “it is an academic exchange activity with the spirit of ‘equality, degree, inclusive, freedom’. Recently, a large number of folk Internet financial enterprises and products are growing in full swing, while some scholars and banks have questioned this new trend. Thereupon, the salon will focus on ‘Internet Finance follows what path’”.
Soul Htite
Soul Htite introduced the technology platform and the innovative mode of the Internet Finance from the Lending Club's development course. He illustrated the mismatch of social media and financial technology with the cooperation failure between Lending Club and Facebook. Then he explained the importance of ideas by the example of Lending Club’s emergence during the Financial Crisis. Htite noted that the most important thing in business is to understand what is happening and what people need rather than the business mode or technology. Afterwards you consider how to deal with issues by adjusting business mode or developing new technology. He also stressed that the financial technology is creating miracles, which is far better than the Internet Finance. Lending Club is using technological means to reduce the influence of the bad debts and the cost, ensuring that the lenders’ fund can be used in high-speed cycle investment.
Guo Yuhang introduced the opportunities and challenges which P2P confronted in China and made comparative analysis about Lending Club, Dianrong mode，domestic classic corporation mode. Guo noted that the influence Internet exerts on finance was ideological. The Internet finance is changing our life gradually by online banks, e-commerce, and internet-based insurance, foreign exchange and loan. Compared with traditional financial institution, internet financial institutions have no deposit reserve pressure. They can also reduce the regular cost via technology means, thus holding an advantage on the cost ratio and small dispersion is the commercial nature of P2P. Through the simplification of the lenders, investors and the supervision department, the customer experience has been improved by the operation mode of the internet-based loangreatly.
Boya Culture Salon is the brand activity of the Graduate Association in which elites from various walks of life such as politics, business, literature and physics, are invited. They discuss hot issues and cultural phenomena with the spirit of "equality, degree, inclusive, freedom”. Genetically modified food, opportunities in the big data era, security landscape around our country and US government’ shutdown crisis have been covered in previous salons. Compared with most academic activities, the salon, where student are guided but by experts from one to two related areas, sparkles ideas and triggers the collision of thoughts.
Background Info:
Soul Htite is CEO and founder of Dianrong and the co-founder and chief technical officer of world's largest network-based loan platform– Lending Club. During his time in office, he is in charge of technology development and operation, dedicating to providing the most advanced network platform technology and the highest information security. Before creating Lending Club, Mr. Soul has worked for Oracle, the world's largest enterprise software company, and was mainly responsible for the design and development of the high real-time online systems and services. He served as a senior manager on the database server’s core technology team and led the team to develop the real-time on-line system management and diagnostic services. He was also an early advocator for the global real-time collaborative product using Oracle. Mr. Soul was honored by the World Economic Forum (The Davos Forum) and the system developed by his team was granted the Technology Pioneer Award. In June 30, 2013, Soul was invited to participate in the world's first Lend It summit and Dianrong was the only invited Chinese Company.
GuoYuhang, co-chief executive and co-founder of Dianrong, used to be the management partner of the Yulan & Partners Law Firm. He has worked as a lawyer for more than 10 years, specializing in legal services of intellectual properties and risk investment. As a lawyer, he had worked for multi-national corporations such as Siemens, Google and Microsoft, specializing in intellectual properties. He had also served as the legal consultant for many venture capital investment fund.
Written by: Ma Rongrong
Edited by: Li Chiyang & Zhang Jiang
Source: PKU News (Chinese)
