China Central Bank to Set Standards for 17 Fintech Categories, Including Blockchain

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) has an agenda to set industry standards across the financial sector, including blockchain, a senior official from the bank said on Wednesday.

Speaking at a meeting of the National Technical Committee, PBoC vice president Yifei Fan said the bank aims to better regulate new technologies applied across the financial industry, according to a report from state media Xinhua News Agency.

Fan said blockchain is among 17 categories of financial technologies, including cloud services and artificial intelligence, to be regulated under the new standards.

“The financial industry either lacks the standards or needs to update the existing standards,” he said. “The current regulations for financial services are not clear and strong enough to guide high-quality developments in the industry.”

A prior round of standards were set for mobile financial payment platforms, voice and image recognition technologies, he said.

The statement comes after two other “industry standards” regimes were created by the government; one for registering all new blockchain projects, with 500 included in the first two tranches, and, the second, for 11 fintech product categories for digital payments.