How can internet finance light up the vast rural market?

The "China Rural Internet Finance Forum," jointly hosted by the Financial New Normal Research Group of the China Society for Economic Reform, the Beijing Branch of the China Institute for Reform and Development (Hainan), and Yimutian, China's agricultural products e-commerce trading platform, was held in Beijing recently. Attending experts and scholars held in-depth discussions around topics such as "rural reform and internet finance" and "opportunities and challenges for rural finance in the internet+ era."

Han Jun, deputy director of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs and deputy director of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Rural Affairs, pointed out that rural financial institutions face dispersed small-scale farming households and a large number of rural small and medium-sized enterprises. Financial needs generally have characteristics such as short terms, high frequency, and small amounts, the transaction costs of financial services are relatively high, and the problem of information asymmetry in the rural credit market is more prominent. Therefore, the methods used to develop urban finance cannot simply be transplanted to rural areas. Internet+ microfinance will enrich the entities supplying rural finance and help shape a more competitive and diversified rural financial service landscape.

Peng Sen, vice chairman of the Financial and Economic Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress and president of the China Society for Economic Reform, pointed out that internet+ has become an important part of promoting industrial transformation and upgrading and cultivating new drivers of economic growth under China's new normal of economic development. But it must also be seen that China's financial market has problems such as excessively high market access thresholds and absent financial regulation, and internet finance has not yet established clear and unified regulatory rules. In the future, it is necessary to encourage innovation, competition, and development, regulate market order, and protect the lawful rights and interests of market participants.

Chi Fulin, president of the China Institute for Reform and Development (Hainan), pointed out that during the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, against the backdrop of economic transformation and upgrading forcing financial reform, rural internet finance is at the "outlet" of major development. Using internet finance to promote rural financial

reform is not only adding the element of the internet to rural finance, but also a reconstruction of agricultural business models. In the future, institutional safeguards for rural internet finance should be formed more quickly.

Deng Jinhong, founder and CEO of Yimutian, believes that "agriculture, rural areas, and farmers" have a large amount of financial demand, but there are problems such as the low degree of informatization of rural household assets, the relatively high uncertainty of agricultural production and transactions leading to uncertainty in debt repayment capacity, the lack of an effective asset evaluation mechanism, and the absence of credit accumulation between trading parties. In the future, these difficulties must be overcome as a priority.