China offers a financial industry exam in English, first test on May 4

Industry exams in English are the latest example of China’s financial opening up.

Starting next month, for the first time, foreign senior staff of private securities funds will be able to take the industry’s qualifying exam in English, the Asset Management Association of China said on its website April 12. The tests are for staff including chairmen and presidents, as well as investment, research and trading heads.

Fidelity International, UBS Asset Management and Man Group are among foreign firms licensed for China’s 2.6 trillion yuan ($414 billion) private securities funds industry, which caters to qualified domestic companies and wealthy individuals, rather than selling products to the public as mutual funds do. The qualifying exams were previously only offered in Chinese, sending foreign firms scrambling for the limited pool of local language speakers to fill such posts.

“This new development is a major step toward welcoming global talent,” Liu Ming, a senior associate at Shanghai-based consulting firm Z-Ben Advisors, said in an email. “This offers more opportunity for foreign managers to transfer key senior members of their overseas teams to oversee and run their China operations.”

China allows foreigners to enter $27 trn payments market

China will permit foreign companies to access its $27 trillion payments market, further opening up the world’s second-largest economy.
Foreign players can start applying for payment licenses and will be treated the same as local firms, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement on Wednesday. Applicants must set up local units, establish payment infrastructure -- including disaster recovery systems — and store client information domestically, the central bank said.
Premier Li Keqiang on Tuesday promised to protect the intellectual property of foreigners investing in its economy, as China seeks to avoid a trade war with the U.

S. Any entrants to the Chinese market -- apart from meeting stiff local regulations -- will also have to compete with the more than 260 firms that have received payment licenses including Ant Financial Services Group’s Alipay and Tencent Holdings’s WeChat Pay.
“The domestic market is quite saturated with very strong domestic players, and it is relatively hard for foreign companies to get a piece of the pie,” said Iris Pang, a Hong Kong-based economist at ING Groep NV. “But there is a chance for them to compete in the cross-border payment market.”

China's OBOR initiative seems aligned with its military interests, says US

US lawmakers on Monday expressed concern over the ambitious 'One Belt, One Road' (OBOR) initiative of China and sought recommendations for improving development finance efforts.

While infrastructure investment is desperately needed across the region, there's more to the 'Belt and Road' initiative than meets the eye, said Congressman Ted Yoho, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific.

Though China has promoted the program as generous win-win assistance to its fellow developing nations, the OBOR seems motivated primarily by self-interest, he said during a Congressional hearing on development finance in Asia.

The Belt and Road projects are financed by Chinese institution at high rates not typically found in the development context conducted by Chinese corporations that are often state-owned enterprise and utilise Chinese labour and material and seem to add little to local economies and can bring unsustainable debt burdens, he said.

The program also seems to be closely aligned with China's strategic and military interests to be more than a mere coincidence, he added.

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