A Characteristic Model for the Innovative Application of Fintech in Emerging Markets

As digital transformation advances rapidly across the globe, fintech has gained strong momentum as a disruptive innovation force in the past few years. Unlike in Europe and America, the development of fintech in emerging markets such as China, India and Southeast Asia shows distinctive characteristics, which has garnered increasing attention.

One of the manifestations is the rising power of fintech institutions represented by banks.

Globally, commercial banks have always been the major force to lead reformations in traditional financing activities. Though emerging economies are late-comers in the financial industry, they are willing to commit to building up their digital power. Taking Chinese mainland as an example, a number of commercial banks with strong technology capabilities have successfully navigated their digital transformation, and exported their fintech capabilities through technical subsidiaries as part of the efforts to expand customer base and gain stronger business advantages in the new industry-finance cooperation ecology.

Throughout the world, the fintech output and innovative cooperation mode adopted by commercial banks in emerging markets have been driving people to reflect on the definition of fintech.

It is noteworthy that since 2022, CMBYC, a fintech subsidiary with banking background, has been frequently mentioned by many top Chinese and US media outlets, offering an interesting and thought-provoking case.

CMBYC, headquartered in Shenzhen, China’s financial center as well as science & technology innovation center, is a fintech subsidiary of the world-famous commercial bank, China Merchants Bank. In July 2022, the authoritative financial media The Banker released its Top 1000 World Banks by Tier 1 2022, in which China Merchants Bank ranked 11. This is the 5th year in a row that CMB has been listed in the top 20 in this ranking.

As a unified platform to export China Merchants Bank’s financial technology, CMBYC bridges up enterprises and…