China is cracking down on big techs’ monopoly in financial data to curb abuses of power and protect consumers’ privacy, according to the country’s banking and insurance watchdog.

China’s pilot of the central bank digital currency has made promising progress. However, the digital RMB system collects and shares less transaction information than traditional electronic payments according to a PBOC digital RMB white paper.

Increased utilisation of financial technology is setting the stage for further digitisation of the Philippine’s consumer banking industry, which is slowly transitioning into a “cash-lite” economy.

Chinese banks well positioned on this year’s strongest banks ranking while performance varied by categories

With 41% of China's $45 trillion in banking assets and 27% of its $30 trillion in loans exposed to the property market, authorities are likely to initiate an orderly distribution of distressed assets of real estate developers such as Evergrande that failed to meet the “three red lines” limit on debt liabilities. Leveraged expansion sabotaged Evergrande’s sustainability while profit from property development shrunk for three consecutive years.

Despite weak growth in the banking industry last year, UOB managed to grow its SME deposits significantly and reported the lowest CIR among its peers. It was also the first bank to announce $2.2 billion in relief assistance in February 2020, ahead of any government support measures. It was the leading provider in government’s assistance schemes to SMEs with the largest market share.

The Chinese government has proposed establishing a joint venture with local technology companies to oversee the collection of data from Chinese consumers.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, joined the Asian Banker’s Emmanuel Daniel and Gordian Gaeta in a debate on the development of the internet, innovation in China, and what the financial industry can learn from both

Implications of new regulations and emergence of digital-only players were hot button issues discussed this year at the Asian Banker Future of Finance ‘Global Transactions Re-invented’ track

Pundits who see fintechs as the epitome of digital revolution need to pause and consider a simple fact, they may well be transitory and more dramatic changes are yet to come

China’s economy grew faster than expected at the start of the year but it remains to be seen if it signals a solid recovery trend as the crisis-hit property sector bears down on growth

The global outage led by the CrowdStrike-Microsoft faulty software update underscores the emerging gaps in resilience, interdependence of systems, vendor concentration, and single points of failure in networks