How China’s Financial Industry Can Harness Digital‑Era Technologies – Insights from Ant Group CTO Cheng Li

The United Nations report on the "Digital Interdependence Era" highlights that opportunities outweigh risks in the digital age, urging smart governance to unlock new possibilities. Against this backdrop, Ant Group Chief Technology Officer Cheng Li discusses how China’s financial sector can seize digital opportunities and enhance service capabilities.

Cheng emphasizes that fintech is not a single institution’s label but a common development path for the industry in the digital era. Achieving breakthroughs in next‑generation financial core technologies is essential for improving the efficiency of the real economy and building core competitiveness.

He identifies five key digital‑finance technologies—Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Security, Internet of Things (IoT), and Computing—collectively called BASIC. These form the foundational tech stack for future financial innovation.

Blockchain can reliably connect financial services with real‑economy processes, enabling trustworthy, fragmented service delivery in a networked production model. China’s fintech firms have already taken a leading position in global blockchain patent filings.

Artificial Intelligence drives data‑driven insights and real‑time decisions, making financial services more efficient, secure, and personalized. Ant Group applies AI across risk control, lending, wealth management, insurance, and customer service, with real‑time risk‑scoring engines processing every Alipay transaction.

Security underpins digital finance, supporting regulatory technology, data protection, and privacy. RegTech capabilities lag behind fintech growth, prompting initiatives like the "Ant Risk Brain" system that assists regulators in identifying illegal financial activities and integrates blockchain for transparent oversight.

IoT enhances user reach and experience by enabling seamless, device‑based payments and generating new data sources for credit assessment, thereby expanding financial inclusion.

Computing provides the backbone for cloud, distributed databases, and middleware, meeting high‑concurrency, strong consistency, and disaster‑recovery demands of large‑scale financial platforms such as Ant Group.

Cheng also points out several challenges: insufficient breakthroughs in core foundational technologies, difficulty in scaling industrial applications leading to duplicated R&D costs, lagging RegTech and security capabilities, and rigid, centralized financial system architectures that hinder openness and collaboration.

To address these issues, he recommends strengthening the industrialization of cloud computing, data intelligence, and blockchain; encouraging market‑driven breakthroughs for high‑value technologies while supporting basic research through policy and funding; increasing tolerance for pilot deployments; and accelerating the transition to open, distributed architectures using blockchain and multi‑party secure computation.

The interview concludes with a call for coordinated national roadmaps to upgrade financial infrastructure within a few years, positioning China’s financial industry to achieve core competitiveness in the digital economy.