FinTech

The coming together of financial services and technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing and big data has yielded groundbreaking commerce and the term “FinTech” – nowhere more momentously than in China.

With the largest tech-savvy population of any country and as much as half the world’s total investment in FinTech, China is the frontrunner in this fast-emerging industry. Yet while China’s regulatory authorities and market generally continue to embrace FinTech in almost all its forms – and the country may stand on the brink of becoming the indisputable global FinTech hub – this inherently self-disruptive industry faces rising regulation to safeguard financial backbones and consumer interests. Nowhere are the opportunities, stakes and need for innovative, adaptive, no-nonsense insights greater than in China’s FinTech industry.

DaHui provides comprehensive cross-disciplinary advice and representation capable of seamlessly covering every aspect of FinTech, from financing and licensing through intellectual property and data compliance to M&A and IPOs, as well as dispute resolution. Our firm is comprised largely of attorneys who brought together backgrounds in finance and technology to contribute to China’s unfettered FinTech growth gearing up in the 2000s, who built their practices advising its giants throughout the regulatory days of the subsequent decade and who were go-to counsel by the time of the watershed in various subsectors of China’s FinTech.

With the success of non-bank FinTech ventures serving China’s unique numbers of under-banked, and more recently the efforts of financial institutions to obtain their ordinarily leading market shares, China has seen novel risks and therefore deployed distinct measures for regulation while also participating in global regulatory waves such as for privacy and data protection. For example, potential monopolies of data and algorithm discrimination appear to have come under scrutiny, protection of consumer credit is a rising interest and the geographic focus of capital market activities may be shifting. As in all market movements, opportunities continue to abound, albeit extra attention to law and policy should accompany any investments in such a dynamic market.

DaHui is built to advise on just such areas of increasing importance for FinTech. Our supreme strengths in technology (particularly the Internet since its advent in China) and finance (in the context of the world’s greatest sustained economic growth) have placed us at the center of the developments of law and business practices; our anti-monopoly team is led by a former deputy director in the Ministry of Commerce; our capital markets team is comprised predominantly of mainland China and Hong Kong IPO and bond experts while we maintain a New York office for U.S. work; our IP team was formed primarily for assisting our long-standing and new FinTech clients in generating and protecting their tech and know-how; and our dispute resolution, labor and employment and investigations teams regularly tackle the most cutting-edge FinTech issues. Thanks to a clientele that includes not only most of China’s FinTech conglomerates but also start-up and other lending platforms, payment companies, financial services providers, insurtech, etc. and their private equity and venture capital investors and other backers, DaHui runs the gamut of FinTech in China and beyond.