Scenes, scenes, scenes!

The Internet financial scene of BATs has actually overturned the past where finance was just finance (that is, single-celled organisms such as financial management, credit or payment), and has entered a stage where financial products are deeply embedded in various life scenes.

Text/Zhang Shule According to media reports, Baidu, Allianz Insurance, and Hillhouse Capital recently announced in a high-profile manner in Shanghai that the three parties will jointly launch a new Internet insurance company to provide customers with innovative insurance services.

This is another major step taken by Baidu in the Internet finance field after Baidu and China CITIC Bank launched the establishment of Baixin Bank on November 18.

At this point, the three Internet giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent have fully launched their layout in major financial fields such as banking, wealth management, credit, and insurance. The decisive battle of BAT in Internet finance is also imminent... But the layout is just a chess piece.

As the helmsman of BAT, can the rank of Yiqi, the leader of BAT, make a big move in the Internet finance, which currently has loud slogans but is actually a bit calm?

Various signs now indicate that the ambushes buried by the three major Internet companies in Internet finance are all based on the word "scenario".

And each gameplay has a strong flavor of thinking of its own main industry.

Tencent: Social finance that remains dispersed in form and spirit Among Internet financial products, the one with the most grassroots content is none other than WeChat red envelopes.

As a vital part of Tencent's Internet financial matrix, WeChat Pay used red envelopes to pave the way and successfully utilized the Chinese traditional festival Spring Festival. During the 2014 Spring Festival, it achieved a powerful scene experience based on WeChat's hundreds of millions of user groups.

The weapon that opens the way is the scene, but the main use scene of red envelopes is mostly the courtesy exchanges between friends. Tencent's way of breaking the situation is to derive more scenes from this.

The first failure: In January 2014, Didi Taxi and WeChat Pay took the lead and promoted mobile payment in 32 cities across the country with the cashback method of "passengers receive an instant discount of 10 yuan and drivers receive a 10 yuan bonus".

On the surface, this is a service launched before red envelopes, but after all, its initial scale is too small and needs to be supported by red envelopes.

However, apart from prompting Alibaba to use Alipay and Kuaidi to counterattack 10 days later, and eventually forming a 900 million yuan subsidy war, this payment experience did not really form a large-scale scenario.

But no matter what, through various blessings and shakes, as of June 2015, WeChat Pay users still reached 400 million.

With this scale of grassroots users, Tencent’s chessboard began to expand.

In March 2014, Tencent made QQ Wallet available on both Android and Apple systems. After that, the establishment of financial products and credit systems such as Financial Management and Tencent Credit Information directly summoned banks, the biggest BOSS of Tencent's financial layout.

In December of the same year, the country's first private bank "Shenzhen Qianhai WeBank Co., Ltd." in which Tencent held 30% of the shares was launched.

The layout is initially revealed: It is not difficult to see that Tencent’s layout is centered around social networking, with banking business as the intermediate flash point, through quick payment (PC side), WeChat payment (mobile side), QQ wallet (Tenpay mobile side)

) is supported by the three major social payment systems, using Wealth Management, Tencent Credit Information and the upcoming WeChat Securities as broad financial products to expand, and is involved in a social financial matrix of loans with an Internet bank with "no branches, no counters, and no property guarantees"

.

However, with the departure of presidents, vice presidents and senior executives from WeBank, Tencent's financial matrix began to collapse.

Where are the roots?

It is precisely Tencent's intention to develop social finance, but it cannot truly "integrate" the QQ and WeChat user groups into banks, the last outlet for overseas expansion.

Advantages turn into disadvantages: It can be said that Tencent's current financial layout is exactly a manifestation of its advantages turning into disadvantages.

Relying on its powerful social network, Tencent's payment business, which started with red envelopes, has grown rapidly. However, Tencent's main business is social networking and gaming, which does not bring enough scene experience. After absorbing companies such as JD.com and Dianping, some e-commerce payments

Although the O2O experience has been launched, it is still insufficient and is not commensurate with its huge community size.

More importantly, the extremely active financial products are still red envelopes or small transactions between acquaintances, nothing more, and it is difficult to extend them to products such as insurance and financial management.

The most considerate scene experience (red envelopes) and the extreme lack of broad application scenarios are obviously the biggest headaches for Tencent at the moment and the key to solving the problem urgently.

Alibaba: A long-tail experience that hooks up with grassroots. Compared with Tencent, Alibaba’s layout in Internet finance is very early, except for Alipay, a specific third-party payment platform that emerged due to China’s credit problems and the huge group of e-commerce users gathered on it.

Jack Ma is also the pioneer among Internet tycoons who finally pays attention to loans to small, medium and micro enterprises.

The starting point is to win people's hearts: In July 2008, Jack Ma made a high-profile announcement that Alibaba would spend 15 billion yuan to help small and medium-sized enterprises survive the winter amid the global subprime mortgage crisis.

Prior to this, in January of the same year, Alipay had actually joined forces with China Construction Bank to provide Taobao sellers who met the credit requirements with personal micro-credit of up to 100,000 yuan.