Recently, I saw a strange article published on a Hong Kong media website. The time was June 65438+1October 65438+June 6, and the author signed Tan's article "Ants Should Win the Nobel Prize in Economics". It can be seen that Teacher Tan, like many people in China, has a strong Nobel Prize complex. This topic also has certain practical significance.

An article signed "Tan"-"Ants Should Win the Nobel Prize in Economics"

In recent years, the success of ant technology in inclusive finance has attracted much attention. All of them provide financial services for the disadvantaged groups, which is inevitably compared with the Grameen model of poor bank of Bangladeshi entrepreneur Yunus, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005. Last year's Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to a three-member team of Indian scholar Abigit Banaji in recognition of their "experimental practice in alleviating global poverty".

What did China do right in the struggle against poverty? What are the representative figures and institutions, and whether they have formed an economic theory worthy of the Nobel Prize is really worth analyzing and studying.

However, Mr. Tan's grotesque essays are somewhat disappointing. Exaggerated expression is suspected of murder. Awkward praise is really not as good as carefree criticism. What is more important than the style of writing is that the views are poor and many misunderstandings are regrettable.

At the end of Tan's article, he emphasized that "central assets have financial interests of Ali, Tencent, JD.COM, Apple, PayPal and others".

According to online information, Tan is the founder and CEO of Hong Kong Central Assets Investment Co., Ltd. At the end of the article, it is specially suggested that "Central Assets owns the financial interests of Ali, Tencent, JD.COM, Apple, PayPal and MasterCard". As an appropriate professional investor, many viewpoints in the article are so inappropriate.

Teacher Tan claimed that her interest in the Nobel Prize in Economics originated from "the absurd mystery of China's economic development". I don't know where the word "absurd" comes from. As a professional investor and interested in economic theory, you should be familiar with the academic explanation of China's economic development. Economists such as Coase, Zhang Wuchang and Lin Yifu all have wonderful theoretical opinions. Obviously, these economists don't find it absurd or mysterious. These famous books are widely circulated. Teacher Tan might as well pay attention to them.

As for Mr. Tan's "materialism as the core value", it seems that he is clumsily imitating some ideological words. If Mr. Tan puts forward a new set of thoughts and theories about China's economic development out of personal interest, it doesn't hurt. In this respect, we can refer to Hu Angang, whose theory is mainly basked in Weibo, which is easy to find.

In a word, China is neither mysterious nor absurd. Every modern country that has successfully entered industrialization has experienced a high growth period of more than 8% of its gross national product for several decades, and Britain, the United States, Germany and Japan have all experienced it, and their respective high growth periods have also been realized under different ideological and social and political conditions.

To say that * * * is universal means to complete industrialization under the condition of marketization, in which the contribution of market economy is the most critical, and China is no exception. This is the time for the government and people to sum up the achievements of reform and opening up. Therefore, explaining China's economic development is not a theoretical innovation at the Nobel Prize level.

Perhaps there is some misunderstanding about the general trend of China's economy, which leads Mr. Tan to be confused about the protagonist Ant Technology in the article, and many judgments are biased.

Because the central assets invested by Mr. Tan hold the financial rights and interests of many large domestic science and technology enterprises, including Ali, he should also know more about the China science and technology enterprises he invested in, so as to avoid misunderstanding and affecting his investment judgment.

Ant tribe (figure/figure worm creativity)

As far as Ali's Ant Technology is concerned, Teacher Tan seems to simply and rudely understand the inclusive finance business that Ant Technology is engaged in as "grabbing the rice bowl" with the traditional banking industry, which is unprofessional.

Teacher Tan believes that "China's banking system is inefficient and fails to provide satisfactory services for small businesses and individuals. In this cultural and physical background, the epoch-making birth of ant technology! " This is a serious misunderstanding of the origin of ant technology. The field of inclusive finance that ants are engaged in was put forward by the United Nations in 2005. Obviously, it is not aimed at "the inefficiency of banks in China", but the expectation of the development of the global financial industry.

Tan believes in the article that "China's banking system is inefficient and fails to provide satisfactory services for small businesses and individuals"

Under the traditional commercial bank model, the disadvantaged groups can't get services, which is a common phenomenon in the world. Take personal financial services as an example. Before the Internet era, the service scope of commercial banks always expanded after entering the affluent society.

For example, credit card business is the main way for commercial banks to provide popular personal financial services. This kind of business appeared after 1950s and entered a new country with the pace of prosperity. So far, it is impossible to carry out credit card business on a large scale in poor areas and vulnerable people. This is not the "inefficiency" of global commercial banks, nor is it the "dissatisfaction" of vulnerable groups with commercial bank services, but the decision of traditional commercial bank operation mode.

Figure/figure worm creativity

A series of mechanisms such as business cost, risk control and credit evaluation of traditional commercial banks are good at providing services for large and mature economic units, while small and micro enterprises and poor people are not their good areas. Commercial banks are not omnipotent, and no financial institution is omnipotent. The length of the ruler is longer than the length of the inch, and the market division corresponds to the market stratification.

According to Teacher Tan's logic, investment banks specialize in high-risk and high-return areas, such as investing in start-ups. Is it because commercial banks are inefficient? Did you rob the commercial bank of its job? This is obviously contrary to common sense, and so is the inclusive finance that serves the disadvantaged groups, but it only appeared later.

Before the birth of inclusive finance, the vulnerable groups have always been the "blind area" of formal financial institutions. Vulnerable groups can only rely on private loans to obtain high-interest and unstable financial services, which is very unfavorable for vulnerable groups to improve their economic situation. With the development of society, this problem is becoming more and more prominent and people pay more and more attention to it. Because the rich and large enterprises get more and more high-quality and efficient financial services, while the financial services of the disadvantaged groups are still in the most primitive state. The inequality of financial services has become an important factor in widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

This is the real problem that inclusive finance wants to solve.

Ant technology has made remarkable achievements in the field of inclusive finance, which is also highly affirmed by Teacher Tan. As he said, the payment business is not the biggest business of ants, and the loan income of individuals and small businesses has accounted for 40% of ants' income.

But Mr. Tan "knows why, but he doesn't know why". He only saw the scale growth of ant technology in inclusive finance, but he didn't understand the real reason for its success in inclusive finance.

The success of ant technology first benefits from the huge market in China. No matter the payment business or inclusive finance, there is no huge market, and no matter how high the technical level and advanced the hardware, enterprises cannot achieve rapid growth. The success of ants first benefits from the fact that China is the largest Internet application market in the world.

Figure/figure worm creativity

China has a large population. The most populous country in the world, this is the beginning of everything, no need to explain.

China has strong economic vitality and strength to become a big market. However, with a huge population and still in the pre-modern society of slash-and-burn and small-scale peasant economy, it will not become a qualified big market.

In addition, due to the advantage of being a latecomer, the Internet penetration rate in China is very high. China has 940 million netizens, while India, with a population close to China, has only 470 million netizens. This determines that the demand for Internet applications in China is huge.

At present, there are not many countries and regions in the world that can meet these three conditions at the same time, so the development advantages of China's Internet industry are obvious. So although ants are small, they stand on the shoulders of giants, which is the basis of their success.

Unique market conditions do not mean that enterprises can win. As Teacher Tan pointed out, Ant Technology has been facing a strong competitor. Its success is not due to monopoly, let alone luck, but to solve the ultimate obstacle in inclusive finance: the credit problem.

In 2006, the year after inclusive finance was put forward by the United Nations, Yunus, a Bangladeshi financial entrepreneur and founder and president of Grameen Bank, won the Nobel Prize in Economics. This is the only time that this award has been awarded to an entrepreneur, because Yunus runs an unusual enterprise.

Yunus (Photo/CCTV News)

Yunus started to operate micro-loan business from 1974, and Grameen Bank, established in 1986, has been committed to providing micro-loans to poor people who cannot obtain loans from commercial banks. Yunus, who was born in Bangladesh's top economic giants, is well versed in business management, and he also knows that the problem of poverty can not be fundamentally solved simply by charitable "poor boys".

The goal of Grameen Bank is to form a sustainable financial model to serve the poor as much as possible. Yunus designed a system for this purpose, many of which have become the standard in inclusive finance.

The most classic is the loan business model designed for the affordability of the poor. Mainly small short-term loans, the poor are more acceptable.

Loan customers of local Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Figure/Figure Worm Creativity)

In terms of risk management, Grameen adopted an internal supervision mechanism of five-person group joint guarantee, and collected group funds and compulsory savings as risk funds according to a certain proportion of the loan amount, and the use of funds was supervised by group meetings and central meetings.

Under the technical conditions at that time, Yunus's design has done all aspects of the poor bank to the extreme. However, the goal of sustainable management has never been achieved. Until 20 1 1, Yunus was asked by the Bangladeshi government to leave immediately because of his age. The operation of Grameen Bank has been subsidized by charitable donations from non-governmental organizations.

The background of Yunus's departure has caused many conjectures and controversies. Some malicious comments accused him of misappropriating funds, and some conspiracy theorists thought that his career was so successful that he achieved "extremely high repayment rate" and offended international capital forces.

None of these comments are correct. Yunus's character is beyond reproach. With his family background and the economic characteristics of South Asian countries, it is unnecessary to take risks and work hard to be a poor bank. But the so-called "extremely high repayment rate" and the "black hand" of international capital are also nonsense.

Since 1974, Yunus started to operate micro-credit, the total amount is only 1000 billion dollars, which is less than nine Niu Yi cents in the huge international finance of trillions of dollars every year. How can it arouse the hostility of international financial predators? The nominal repayment rate of this $654.38+000 billion is around 80%, which really exceeds expectations.

However, Yunus will control the interest below the red line of 10%, and it is difficult to maintain its huge and decentralized management system. Grameen Bank has never made a profit, and its operating conditions are extremely fragile. Without the charity support of NGOs, Grameen Bank could not survive as early as 1998 Bangladesh flood.

Bangladeshi residents get housing loans from rural banks (photo/photo creativity)

It is precisely because of the limitations of the Grameen bank model in operating ability that it is difficult to replicate.

Yunus's career suffered a more obvious setback in India. Charity support cannot bear the pressure of India's huge poor population. The Indian version of Grameen Bank can only break through the red line of interest rate and move towards "usury". Even so, it is on the verge of subprime mortgage crisis.

It's a pity that Yunus left on 20 1 1. But what is more regrettable is that the Grameen model actually failed. The boundary between enterprise management and charity is always unclear, and it is unsustainable to leave external blood transfusion. Around 20 14, with the help of JD.COM, Yunus resumed his career in China, which was a sensation for a while, but ended without results.

The reason is that the Grameen model fails to solve the most fundamental problem of finance-credit. The credit information of the rich and large enterprises is flooding, and financial institutions can easily obtain credit information such as their assets, revenues and expenditures, financial records over the years, so as to make clear and accurate credit evaluation and judgment.

The credit status of poor people and small and micro enterprises is discrete and vague, which is far from the record system of financial system. It is difficult for traditional financial institutions to identify and judge their credit status, so they can only use higher interest rates to fill the system risk. However, high interest rates increase the risk of borrowers and make the credit base of this group more fragile.

This is an infinite loop, which will inevitably lead to business stagnation.

Grameen didn't actually get out of this infinite loop, not because Yunus's design was insufficient, but because traditional technical means could not realize his design intention. Credit barrier is the end of Yunus and the starting point of ants.

When Yunus won the Nobel Prize in 2006, Alipay was only established for two years. 20 13, the year before Yunus came to China, Alipay officially began to transform into a micro-financial service enterprise. Coincidence in time is not pure accident. There is a subtle connection between ants and Grameen-that is, the application of Internet technology has promoted the generation alternation of inclusive finance's career.

Using information technology to break through the credit barrier is the best way to spread Yunus' cause.

Alipay (Figure/Figure Worm Creativity)

The essence of credit is information. Lenders should publish their own credit information, and lenders should collect these credit information and make evaluation, analysis and judgment. Every credit transaction is based on the matching of credit information. Therefore, the accuracy and convenience of credit information determine the final financial transaction cost, which is the realistic version of Coase's "transaction cost theory".

The success of ants in the field of inclusive finance has surpassed the achievements of predecessors, precisely because it greatly reduced the information cost necessary for financial transactions, which started from Taobao's e-commerce platform business.

E-commerce platform not only provides technical support for all participants in commercial activities, but also forms a trading system with strong execution. Technology and system work together to reduce the cost of commercial transactions on the platform, and the reduction of commercial transaction costs will inevitably extend to financial transactions, because in the Internet environment, credit information generated in commercial activities can be collected and integrated at a very low cost and become effective information that financial institutions can apply. The integration of a large number of scattered transaction information naturally forms a low-cost credit market, which leads to the natural process of the financial side becoming a market.

This process is naturally difficult for traders to detect, and buyers rarely realize that it is providing credit evaluation for stores when scoring store reviews. Before the "unforgettable" internet technology was applied to commercial transactions, customers' praise or spit could not be accurately recorded and collected as credit information, let alone obtained financial credit services as a credit basis. This kind of information loss is more harmful to the vulnerable groups. Vulnerable groups do not have large transaction records and high asset certificates, and fragmentary information in daily business activities is their only credit information.

Taobao and other e-commerce platforms have inadvertently completed the credit cultivation and information collection of vulnerable groups, which is the first step for vulnerable groups to approach financial resources. Ant Technology enables the financial industry and vulnerable groups to "hold hands" with electronic payment services, and finally breaks through the barriers in inclusive finance.

How many young people in small towns who have just entered big cities have obtained the first credit loan in their lives? If you don't have much money, you have to pay interest, but the value of this trust is beyond the measure of money. How many small and micro enterprises are rejected by banks, holding small loans from ants in one hand and running their own small businesses on Taobao in the other? This is the value of inclusive finance.

Figure/figure worm creativity

Taking technology as a tool and reducing transaction costs as a means to obtain financial services for vulnerable groups is the core business logic of Ant Technology. Teacher Tan may have confused the essential difference between scientific and technological services and traditional financial loan arbitrage model. Although he also noticed some signs, he did not make a correct interpretation.

As Teacher Tan pointed out, ants "give 98% loans to banks, and ants only charge a little service fee". Teacher Tan has many doubts about ants not taking the loan risk. In fact, the difficulty in inclusive finance has never been money, nor is it that banks are unwilling to lend, but the transaction cost caused by credit problems is too high to bear-either banks are afraid to lend or private usurers can't afford it. This time, it is a practical problem that ants have to solve by means of science and technology. Ants have greatly reduced transaction costs for both parties by means of science and technology. Shouldn't they charge service fees?

In this way, there is naturally no soul torture of "taking the loan risk". Teacher Tan misunderstood the corporate nature of ants. How can an enterprise whose main income is service fee be a Fintech company whose main income is arbitrage?

Teacher Tan also confused the difference between platform business and self-operated business and misjudged the essence of ant business expansion, which is not a mistake that a professional investor should make. The fact that major financial institutions conduct business on the platform of ants does not mean that ants are integrated with it. For example, Maotai sells goods on Taobao. Is Taobao the largest liquor company in China?

From the perspective of platform business, it is not surprising to observe the business increment of ants in various fields. A science and technology service-oriented enterprise will not and need not intervene to compete with customers for jobs. Ants are not pythons and have no ambition to swallow elephants.

Ali, who is famous for his rich golden sentences, has a famous saying, "I hope there is no hard business in the world", which is reflected incisively and vividly in Ant's career in inclusive finance. Ant is to make the financial industry of vulnerable groups no longer a difficult business, so that the poor can afford it and financial institutions dare to lend. Being a couple is a win-win situation. This is not far from the lofty spirit of "copper smell", but it is a kind of grounding gas with sustainable operation and affordable cost.

As for the Nobel Prize in Economics, Teacher Tan thinks too much. Honor should be awarded to a great scholar like Coase, an idealist and a pioneer like Yunus, while enterprises only need a little more good understanding and less malicious speculation or killing. This is especially important for China enterprises now.

If Teacher Tan has any expectations for the future of China, he should be happy to see this fast-paced little ant struggling to overcome poverty.