Prudential is evolving in China's open financial market, Mike Wells, the group chief executive of Prudential told Xinhua in a recent interview.
Since establishing the first China-UK insurance joint venture with CITIC Group in China in 2000, Prudential has entered the Chinese market for nearly 20 years. "We have the insurance market which is mostly life and health and very successfully continues to grow," Wells said, "Now we want to compete more directly with some of the major Chinese firms."
Last year, China taken multiple measures to promote further "opening-up" in the financial sector, such as abolishing the restrictions on the share-holding ratio for foreign investment in bank and asset management companies.
Last December, Prudential's asset management company launched its wholly foreign owned enterprise (WFOE) in Shanghai.
"Our strategy is multiple legs. We have three pension licenses now. We're trying pension products because if you think of the ageing demographics in China, the retirement funding pension is going to be a very big business and that's one of our specialities globally," Wells said, "We think that's a very important part of our China strategy."
"We are going to build a modern platform. It tends to be very digital and basically cloud-based. It's also where the consumers want to interact with us. We will mostly use Wechat and Alipay and very little checks and cash in that platform," he said.
Last month, Prudential's joint venture in China, CITIC-Prudential, received regulatory approval to establish a branch in China's Shaanxi province, the company's 20th branch in China. "It's a lot of conversations within investors about the scale of some of provinces and cities in China," Wells said. He noted the metropolitan market in China is much bigger than Europe, "So we need to put a lot of infrastructures to succeed in that market. It's still a work in progress."
When talking about financial cooperation between the UK and China after the Brexit, Wells believed that the relationship between the two countries will be as good as usual.
He said, "The relationships were good before the Brexit vote. Certainly good now and they're more important to both entities after the Brexit. China wants to continue to grow. Foreign markets are a big part of that. London should be a key hub to raise capital for some of the other markets. So I see the cooperation growing."
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