Lin Guangming: Smart financial services present both challenges and opportunities

Smart cities are in fact closely related to the financial sector. Lin Guangming, Chief Corporate Banking Officer of Bank of China (Hong Kong) Limited, said that the development of smart cities poses enormous challenges and opportunities for the financial sector, because while mobile payment makes payments more convenient, it also makes supervision more difficult. While traditional commercial banks operate under strict supervision, Internet finance has brought about enormous breakthroughs.

Lin said that the financial sector has done a lot of exploration. In several aspects, it may bring great convenience for the development of cities and residents’ mobility. First, innovation and technology (I&T) drives financial services into a fully digital era, improving customer experience and satisfaction by realizing inclusive finance and personalized services, as well benefiting customers that cannot be served by traditional models. Moreover, there will be more technologies to help global payment and clearing in the future. In this regard, the banks should greatly improve their service standards to stay on top of the rapidly changing global development landscape.

He added that financial fraud is hard to guard against, but in the future, due to the development of technology, this area will be greatly strengthened and improved, thus reducing disputes that may arise during global trade transactions and payments. As traditional banking and financial technology (fintech) are mutually complementary, the banks can leverage their existing strengths to more quickly explore new fintech applications.