Over the years, the financing difficulties of small and medium-sized enterprises have been the focus of the two sessions and the government work report. Despite the good policy, there are still a lot of small and medium-sized enterprise financing needs are not being met, according to the world bank in 2018 released by the micro, small and medium enterprises financing gap: in emerging markets the micro, small and medium-sized enterprise financing shortage and opportunity assessment report, micro, small and medium enterprises in our country potential financing gap as high as $1.9 trillion.

Supply chain finance has been regarded as a natural remedy to solve the problem of financing difficulty of small and medium-sized enterprises in a sustainable way because of its genetic characteristics of integrating four streams. However, since the introduction of supply chain finance in China in 2001, the development can be described as slow. Although the industry started with traditional Banks, it seems difficult to rely on them for breakthroughs and development. Due to the problems of high customer acquisition cost, high due investment, high risk cost of information asymmetry, low matching degree between bank credit solution and "short, small, frequent and urgent" financing demand of small and micro enterprises, enterprises in the supply chain ecosystem that traditional Banks can serve are very limited. According to statistics, only 37% of small and micro businesses can get bank financing.

Transfer lies in the development of technology, artificial intelligence, chain blocks, cloud computing, big data such as the feasibility of the application in the field of supply chain finance is verified, make the past alone by the bank before, and can't pull again how hard heavy supply "chain", gradually evolved into construction jointly by the parties, the initiative forward intelligent ecosystem.

Four evolutions of supply chain finance

Supply chain finance has gone through a century-long era of 1.0, in which importers and exporters mainly conducted point-to-point trade finance activities under the guidance of Banks in order to reach a deal. For example, HSBC lent loans to British enterprises to facilitate their trade between colonies, and they also went to China to sell opium.

After 1980, the development of ERP technology standardized the process management of enterprises, and Banks began to try to cooperate with enterprises connected to ERP in a large number, entering the era of supply chain finance 2.0 at the enterprise end.

After another 20 or 30 years, some technology enterprises that study system solutions have transformed into third-party service platforms to provide operational services for financial institutions such as Banks, which represents the beginning of the 3.0 era of supply chain finance.

Now supply chain finance has entered the era of 4.0, which is characterized by a large number of applications of artificial intelligence, block chain, cloud computing, big data and other technologies to enable it;

Next, supply chain finance will rapidly enter the era of 5.0, which is the era of supply chain ecology. The functions of core enterprises will be weakened, the focus will be more on the interaction between core enterprises and their multi-level suppliers and distributors, and more attention will be paid to the formation and construction of an overall industry ecosystem.

The stage of transition from 4.0 to 5.0 in supply chain finance is exactly the stage of rapid popularization of fintech. The combination of supply chain finance and fintech is accompanied by a rapid popularization period, during which the whole society continuously popularizes a set of asset securitization theory based on fintech methodology to various original asset parties, investment bank roles and capital parties through various partners and competitors.

"Cutting-edge technology, led by ABCD, has had four impacts on the financial sector: one is to reduce labor costs, two is to reduce operational risks, three is to improve business efficiency, and four is to increase capacity output." Chen kai, managing director of sinopac (China) financial leasing co., offers an interesting analogy. "ai can be seen as a brain, applied to loan approval, asset appraisal, risk assessment and face brushing. Big data is like blood, which is applied to anti-fraud, precision marketing, risk assessment, stock price prediction, intelligent investment management and other fields. Block chain is the nerve of the human body, which is applied in the fields of supply chain finance, payment and clearing, data bill and credit investigation. "Cloud computing is like a muscle connecting tissues. It is the infrastructure of the human body."

These four technologies cover the entire process of financial business, and are driving the change and evolution of the financial industry.

Core enterprises to the core, the underlying assets is the key

How can technologies such as big data take supply chain finance off the bench and into the spotlight?

The over-dependence on the core enterprises and the impenetrability of the underlying assets are the key to the difficult control of supply chain financial risks, as well as the two mountains that hindered the development of supply chain finance in the past.

Lian yi melting JiKun million euro financial interview, President pointed out that at present the biggest difficulties of asset securitization is that how to from the aspects of authenticity, compliance, effectiveness of three integrated consideration and comprehensive grasp the risk of the underlying assets, including the evaluation of the quality of the underlying assets, in term of dynamic regulation of the underlying assets, etc.

So, how to achieve the underlying asset transparency?

Song qun thinks it is necessary to cooperate with the new technology in the following three aspects:

The first is the choice of assets. In asset securitization, an asset package often involves hundreds or even thousands of suppliers, and the workload to verify one by one is huge. Therefore, we now connect the business license, invoice, contract and other information of enterprises to the platform through block chain technology. Automation can greatly improve operational efficiency;

The second is the review of the pooling of assets. All the roles in the whole supply chain from the capital end to the asset end join the platform ecosystem to realize multi-dimensional data cross-validation and greatly reduce the risk of fraud. At the same time, the application of blockchain is also conducive to realize decentralization, reduce the credit dependence of supply chain finance on a single core enterprise, and extend it to more upstream and downstream multi-level suppliers and dealers.

The third is the management of the issuance process and the existence after issuance. Through the design of the platform, intermediary institutions, such as securities firms, law firms and exchanges, can check the status of underlying assets in a system at any time, so that the status of assets from issuance to survival is transparent.

These are good examples of technology driving supply chain finance.

There are two major limitations on the main credit of core enterprises, one is the concentration of risk, the other is the limited assets. For example, when HSBC handled lehman brothers' securitised products in 2008, it found that the underlying asset value of its bond products was still 95% of what it was before the financial crisis, even though lehman brothers collapsed in the financial crisis, says Mr Song. Therefore, it is the key to do a good job in supply chain financial products to transform the main credit into asset credit and grasp the underlying assets.

Source: sina finance and economics