Chinese Regulators Order Tech Companies to Standardize Financial Businesses
A photo of the flag of the People’s Republic of China. (radiowood, https://flic.kr/p/7asMfM; CC BY-NC 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)
On April 29, Chinese regulators from the China Banking Regulatory Commission, China Securities Regulatory Commission, and State Administration of Foreign Exchange announced that they have ordered 13 of China’s biggest tech companies, including Tencent and ByteDance, to “standardize” their online financial businesses. Regulators will likely require firms to spin off payments programs and may even eliminate some firms’ insurance, wealth management and lending practices.
The People’s Bank of China stated that some of the firms will need to set up financial holding companies to house certain parts of their businesses. Financial holding companies are subject to heightened restrictions on their assumption of financial risk. (One commentator sugge