Financial institutions have found themselves in a race to adapt and evolve as FinTech and digitisation make their mark.</p> Traditional lines between technology and finance continue to blur, and against this backdrop China’s FinTech giants have emerged as formidable disruptors.</p> According to Haydn Shaughnessy, co-founder of advisory firm The Disruption House, and Zennon Kapron, Director at market researcher Kapronasia, the BAT – Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent – are leading this Chinese wave of disruption in financial services, making deeper inroads than their western counterparts.</p> They have published a research paper in association with Innotribe, which was launched at Sibos 2015 Singapore – The Platform for Disruption: How China’s FinTech will change how the world thinks about banking</em></a>.</p> The paper highlights that whilst FinTech in the West is not without strong players, the BAT benefit from a growing capital base and protection from global competition through China’s Great Firewall. </p> The success of these companies means they are no longer considered as emerging players. While their origins are in FinTech, their numbers evidence their march towards mainstream adoption.</p> For example, Baidu sold out its own RMB 3 billion big data-based mutual fund within three days of its 2014 launch. Meanwhile, Alibaba’s Alipay service handles nearly 80% of all Chinese mobile payments. And Tencent’s chat application is used by over 500 million people for daily communication, as well as payments and wealth management.</p> The highly-scaled internet and mobile platforms of the BAT boast an IT infrastructure fully capable of supporting digital banking. Their technology was built with the agility to handle millions of searches, online transactions and mobile communications. </p> In pursuit of effective digitisation, western banks have focused on platform renewal, alliances and acquisitions and, most recently, blockchain. But will these strategies stand up against China’s stiff competition?</p> The authors’ case for China’s advantage is convincingly argued: “China’s big tech companies are powered by big data, informed by automated feedback loops from customer activity, driven by business experimentation rather than IT, function at an unprecedented scale and operate at a new degree of service integration.”</p> Citing the country’s unique economic growth, tech restrictions and platform approach, the paper describes how China is a catalyst for disruptors with unique characteristics that in turn are in the position to drive change globally.</p> It is clear that there are many ways to respond to disruption, but for banks the ultimate question is ‘Are we capable of changing our core operations? Can we begin thinking like an enterprise platform?’</p> The paper is the third in a series published to highlight topics which were at the top agenda of this year's Innotribe programme at Sibos. It is available on innotribe.com</a>, together with previous research on Power Women in FinTech and Millennial Generation. </p>