New | Lufax rides internet finance boom
Ping An unit to position itself as broad financial services platform for wealth management
Lufax, the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending arm of Ping An Insurance, is transforming itself to become an open platform for trading broad selections of financial assets, leveraging the boom in internet finance.
When Lufax, the short form of Shanghai Lujiazui International Financial Asset Exchange, started in 2011, the only product was P2P lending. "But now we are trying to be a much broader open platform," Gregory Gibb, the chairman of Lufax, told the
"We can work together with funds, insurance companies and financial licence holders to bring in more selections of assets."
Lufax's change comes amid Ping An's plan announced last month to consolidate online and offline businesses. It will bring together Lufax, Ping An's online direct loan business and the credit guarantee insurance business unit of Ping An Property & Casualty Insurance, strengthening its consumer finance services arm.
Lufax will not run its offline team after the consolidation but focus on online business covering broader asset categories, while its offline support will come from Ping An. Doing offline and online business together would need more resources, Gibb said, but Lufax saw no need to do so.
The model for P2P business in the coming two to three years would be an offline-to-online model, he said. Ping An, which has more than 20 different financial licences, could help Lufax in sourcing assets.
Ping An's consolidation was an idea by Ma Mingzhe, the chairman of Ping An, the country's second-largest insurer.
