Several reports have recently pointed to China as the world’s leading country for fintech innovation and adoption; in the first nine months of 2016 over 50% of global fintech investments went to China and the country is reporting the world’s four largest fintech unicorns; overall, China has a number of unique factors fueling its fintech growth; some of the main factors include regulatory initiatives and tech savvy underserved consumers and SMEs driving demand; the country is also reporting corporate banks with higher comparative ROEs and greater willingness to invest in digital; additionally, the country’s top e-commerce businesses, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, are also significantly influencing fintech growth with growing businesses and investments in payments as well as new technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence; P2P lending is one of fintech’s dominant categories with China leading Asia-Pacific market development and reporting 99% of P2P transaction volume, a total value of $101.7 billion in 2015 and over 4,000 P2P lenders. Source
