Chinese financial technology (fintech) companies are revolutionizing the financial industry with groundbreaking payment innovations, transforming the way people do business.
For decades, China's finance sector was controlled by state-owned giants, but the rise of fintech has disrupted this dominance, paving the way for a new era of innovation and competition. This rapid adoption of fintech is driving a shift towards a cashless economy and transforming daily life.
In an interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN), Zhou Ye, founder and CEO of Huifu Payment, said that capturing just one percent of the payment market is a benchmark of success, and his company has already achieved impressive scale, processing over 410 billion U.S. dollars in transactions annually.
The country's non-bank financial institutions handled more than 1.3 trillion digital payment transactions in 2024, worth an excess of 331 trillion yuan (about 45.4 trillion U.S. dollars), according to the People's Bank of China.
Huifu was among the first batch of fin-tech firms to join the revolution in China's payment industry. It was the first third-party payment company being approved to conduct fund sales online in China.
"After the emergence of new technologies, the market needs imagination, customized design and faster speed. Private companies are filling this gap. I think, 80 percent of the transaction volume come from state-owned companies, but 80 percent of the transaction numbers would come from private companies," he said.
Zhou founded Huifu in 2006. Before that, he had nearly 10 years of working experience in IT in foreign-invested firms, and another six years in a state-owned financial institution. Additionally, Zhou was involved in founding UnionPay's online payment platform, ChinaPay.
The company started doing cross-border business in 2016, and went through a very tough period to figure out the right model. Now, this company has been collaborating with many prominent foreign companies due to the increasing number of foreign retail firms undertaking digital transformation.
So far, it has grown from a team of 30 to a company with more than 1,000 employees.
His goals are evidently evolving in response to the new demands arising from the development of various industries and companies in China.
"Every time when I want to take a pause, there's a huge wave coming. So for us, we want to try them all. Our next goal is that we want to be able to receive payment across the world. This means, we have to connect with all banking systems and wallet managers around the world," he said.
In January this year, Huifu expanded its business to Australia, opening a subsidiary with a team of six.
"It was in March 2020, that I realized this could be a huge market. I was at home, monitoring every day's transaction volume. All of a sudden, I found that the cross-border business was growing by several times. And it's still growing by more than 30 percent every year," he said.
So far, the company can fulfill payment in more than 150 countries and regions with more than 25 currencies.
China's payment companies are taking the lead in the world, and Chinese firms are able to compete with foreign counterparts with their volume, according to Zhou.
China's leading fintech firms revolutionize digital payment systems
