ABSTRACT
Platforms P2P in China is currently a “wild-west” of fi nance. Tens of fi rms come online and tens more fail every month, loan intermediation has skyrocketed, and regulations seem to be a minimal constraint. In their report on the fi rst half of 2015, Online Lending House and Yingcan Group put the number of operating platforms at 2,028 by the end of June 2015. 1
Just under 900 of these platforms came online in the first six months of 2015 alone, and 73 leading platforms have already intermediated 500 million RMB or more. 2 According to these statistics, Guangdong’s Hongling Capital intermediated just short of 13 billion RMB in June and July of 2015. To put this in international perspective, the loans intermediated by this one platform in the last two months is approximately equal to the total intermediated by the UK’s entire P2P industry in 2014.
