In the first half of this year, the four major state-owned banks, the giants in the financial industry, all chose to sign strategic cooperation agreements with Internet giants. The earliest was in March, when Alibaba, Ant Financial and China Construction Bank announced strategic cooperation. In June, the three major industrial and agricultural banks respectively announced strategic cooperation agreements with JD.com, Baidu, and Tencent. The convergence of their behaviors and the intensity of their rhythms even make people wonder whether they are driven by regulatory authorities... Of course, this is a wild guess. . In a report, the author asked whether they should "complement each other's advantages and join forces", or should they "feed the tiger with their own bodies" and strengthen their opponents? In fact, this combination is neither a mutual embrace nor a willing dedication. It is still a new round of homogenization, follow-up, and helpless innovation.

From the perspective of cooperation content, Alibaba and China Construction Bank must jointly promote the online card opening business of CCB's credit cards, as well as offline and online channel business cooperation, electronic payment business cooperation, and open up the credit system. In the future, the two parties will also realize mutual recognition and mutual scanning of QR code payment, and Alipay will support CCB mobile banking APP payment. ICBC and JD.com will carry out comprehensive and in-depth cooperation in the fields of financial technology, retail banking, consumer finance, corporate credit, campus ecology, asset management, and personal joint accounts. Agricultural Bank of China and Baidu will first build a "Financial Technology Joint Laboratory". The current cooperation between the two parties mainly focuses on credit business, financial management business, customer profiling based on big data and analysis and mining, precision marketing, customer credit evaluation, risk monitoring and intelligent customer service, intelligent investment advisory, etc. In the future, the two parties will also explore cooperation in aspects such as asset securitization, virtual currency and industrial Internet finance. Bank of China and Tencent announced that they have established a joint financial technology laboratory, which will focus on in-depth cooperation based on cloud computing, big data, blockchain and artificial intelligence to build inclusive finance, cloud finance, smart finance and technology. finance.

On the whole, the scope of cooperation announced by all parties is relatively large and comprehensive, and there is no particularly clear direction. In comparison, it seems more pragmatic for Agricultural Bank of China and Bank of China to cooperate with Baidu and Tencent to set up a joint laboratory. After all, only by putting coders and architects from both sides together can there be normal communication, otherwise the leaders will chat and laugh on the stage. , the people below can only act in a hurry, and can only end up making a fuss if they can't get the idea right.

In an era when individual users are being hijacked by WeChat Pay and Alipay, the banking industry is undoubtedly very anxious. The general trend is already very clear - if the Internet giants continue to monopolize like this, the future of banks will be today's communication operators, which can only serve as infrastructure, and their functions of serving customers will be completely degraded. In 2015, when ICBC held an Internet strategy conference, the giant-screen ppt, casual wear, and a series of product launches were all Internet routines. The audience thought they were in the wrong lecture hall, but it was really refreshing. However, after trying the APP, I have mixed feelings. The user experience is not as good as any p2p financial management software that was launched within 3 months of development. Just like the popular ICBC e-commerce platform, a series of apps released by ICBC are about to develop in a direction that has no sense of existence.

The financial technology we talk about every day is actually still at the "technology" stage. In financial institutions with a large number of employees, complex branches, and strict hierarchical management, the possibility of success can be imagined if "marginalized" technology departments and data centers drive products and drive transformation. If you look at the news in the past few years, it is not the first time that banks have cooperated with BATJ. I hope there will be progress every time. Every time when cooperation comes, it seems that innovation is imminent, and it is even necessary to break the boat and fight against the odds. If we must look forward to something from this embrace, it is that we hope that the traditional financial giants represented by the four major behaviors will do these things well:

The first is to improve user experience. The R&D center with thousands of people should make mobile apps and related products more "Internet-like". It is easy to hand over this responsibility to the cooperating laboratories.

The effect to be achieved is that these apps no longer exist just for the sake of existence, but sit at the bottom of the list with 2-3 star reviews. They can have real customer reviews on the list and can truly solve the problems that Alipay cannot solve. Problem, at least it can compete with the products of second-tier Internet companies or star startups.

The second is to bring the data to life and look for value models that can be replicated. The value of data should start from the motivation of the Internet to actively cooperate with banks. Most of the judgments of user value from Internet data have very low correlation - it is difficult for us to judge a person who forwards jokes in Moments every day and a person who posts jokes every day. Whoever forwards Chicken Soup to Moments has a higher credit rating. Banks are different. Most directly, the flow and consumption records of an account are the core information about the credit rating of the household head. And this is just a sample of the vast amounts of data banks hold. Why can’t banks currently do this? Because although most banks have set up data centers or data management departments, most of the tools they use are off-the-shelf systems such as SAS. They lack independently developed AI or data mining tools and have no motivation to do this. deep. Banks' mainstream understanding of IT is still at the stage of IT, technology, services, and operation and maintenance. They have engineers, CIOs, and even CDOs, but there is no role like "data scientist" yet. On the contrary, the research institutes of top Internet companies are already familiar with doing similar things, which is the shortcoming that banks need to make up for.

The third is to drive innovation in financial technology. Isn’t this just for pure innovation? Are financial institutions necessarily stupid? Obviously not, it’s just that the approach was incorrect, but now it’s a little more correct. A good example is a piece of news about Ping An Technology. The original text is: On May 9, the latest test results released by the internationally authoritative face recognition database LFW showed that the face recognition technology of Ping An Technology, a subsidiary of Ping An Group, leads well-known domestic and foreign companies with a recognition accuracy of 99.8 and the lowest fluctuation range, ranking first No. 1 in the world. This accuracy is the best result announced by LFW and is also a milestone achievement achieved by Ping An Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. What does it mean to be innovation-driven? It is at the future artificial intelligence IJCAI and AAAI conferences, and at the data mining SIGKDD and ICDM conferences that we no longer only see Microsoft and IBM, but also ICBC and China Merchants Bank. This is not difficult. I believe that the academic community will welcome it very much, and its value and significance must be very far-reaching.