Tech China Post #39

Deloitte is investing $200M to expand its China presence. The investment will be mainly used to build talent development and to further shift its business from audit to emerging areas such as fintech.

China has now banned WhatsApp. With this ban, Facebook has no direct and visible presence in China. As part of the broader regulation into messaging apps and social platforms, the chat messaging apps in China now have to provide verified user identities to the Chinese government if requested.

The Bank of China, the China Construction Bank, the Agricultural Bank of China, and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which collectively is called the “Big Four” Chinese banks, are set to launch a blockchain-enabled 3rd-party insurance sales platform. Direct insurance distribution to consumers in China is not a developed market until only in the recent years. Given the limited legacy infrastructure, blockchain based sales and settlement platform for insurance will provide additional margin to banks selling these insurance products while providing a more secure and rapid process end-to-end.

The Chinese government has signaled broader use of emerging and advanced technologies to help anticipate crimes before they occur. Using various technologies already implemented today from facial recognition to drones and with plans to adopt large scale data analytics and AI capabilities, Chinese government will implement more advanced software and big data solutions to stop crimes across cities.

Alibaba acquired about 10% of a domestic bricks-and-mortar grocery retailer as it continues to take a chapter out of Amazon and try to expand both the ground and e-commerce market share and operations in various consumer verticals.