Principles and Methods for Regulating Fintech: Experience from the Vanished Chinese P2P Network Lending Platforms

Fintech, as a combination of finance and technology, represents the future development direction of the financial industry. P2P network lending platform is a common form of Fintech platform. China’s P2P network lending platforms have gone through a process from rise to prosperity and finally to extinction. For the future development of the Fintech industry, the focus of this article is to draw on the experience of regulating P2P network lending platforms for new financial platforms’ regulation. This paper summarizes five basic regulatory principles of Fintech and reiterates the importance of adhering to these regulatory principles by revealing the issue of policy inconsistency in P2P network lending platforms’ regulation. Learning lessons from the regulatory problems of P2P network lending platforms in China, this article proposes four specific suggestions, which follow basic regulatory principles of Fintech, including establishing industry self-discipline mechanisms, establishing certain market access standards, establishing information disclosure mechanisms, and adopting the Regulatory Sandboxes to regulate Fintech platforms.