Harnessing Internet finance with innovative cyber credit management

In the last two decades, Internet technologies, such as cloud computing, mobile communications, social media, and big data analytics, have brought tremendous changes to our society and reshaped the business in various industries. Specifically, the mushrooming innovations in the financial area fertilized by information and communication technologies indicates the advent of the Internet finance era. Applying the exploratory research approach, we investigate major innovative Internet-based financial services and classify them into five categories, as of e-commerce, e-payment, e-money market, online loan services, and digital currencies. Then we propose a market structure of Internet finance extended from the traditional financial market. We claim that credit management is the key issue in the marketplace of Internet finance, characterized by big data analytics, in which cyber credit appears as whole-process, multi-dimensional, and holographic. We further suggest that cyber credit be represented in the form of vector to overcome the limits of traditional single-value measure in cyber credit management. Based on this framework, we raise main research issues in Internet finance from the perspectives of theory, technology, and governance.