Chinese tech giant LeEco’s finance arm LeFinance made its first official appearance in Beijing on Wednesday. LeFinance explained its vision for LeEco’s financial ecosystem to the public.
LeFinance sees itself as more than the internetization of traditional financial services, but rather as an exploration of a new mode of “ecological finance” in the internet era.
“LeFinance has its roots in LeEco, but is not confined to it: rather, LeFinance will feed back into LeEco. LeEco has expanded its internet ecosystem to the whole world, thanks to its internet ecosystem globalization strategy. This has provided conditions for the fast development of our financial ecosystem,” said Wang Yongli, CEO of LeFinance, in the press conference on Wednesday.
According to Wang, the main businesses of LeFinance will be in five sectors: online payments, transaction platforms, financial information platforms, wealth management, and internet credit. The individual users and micro, small and medium-enterprises users of LeEco will have priority in receiving LeFinance’s services.
LeFinance wants to set up an online platform for the selling and transactions of financial products.
The company’s financial info platform will be mainly based on Finance.le.com, the finance channel of LeEco’s online video site. It provides several financial products for individual investments. Its internet credit will be both to business and customer, online and offline, in and beyond LeEco’s ecosystem, covering supply chain finance, consumer finance, micro and small enterprise finance, and automobile finance.
LeFinance was launched in August 2015. The combination of entertainment and video with finance will be a highlight of the company.
The size of the internet finance market in China will reach RMB 17.8 trillion (USD 2.6 trillion) by the end of 2016, and RMB 43 trillion by the end of 2020, according to LeFinance’s report on Wednesday.
Other Chinese tech giants have all set foot in the finance sector. Baidu established its financial service group in December 2015, Tencent has its own wealth management platform, “Licaitong”, and Alibaba’s Ant Financial dates back to 2004, when the company unveiled its online payment system, Alipay.
(Top photo is screenshot from jr.lemall.com)
