When the wind comes, titanium (Pintec), a financial technology solution service, has experienced its moments: it was founded in 2016, listed in the United States two years later, hundreds of partners, and an ecosystem connecting commercial and financial institutions. With many peers can not reach the glory.
With the change of the macro environment, the whole industry has great ups and downs.Pintec Technology HoldingsEncountered a lot of difficulties soon after the listing: a sharp decline in market value, delayed financial statements, CEO sick leave, and so on.
But "when God closes a door, he always opens another window." after years of exploration, the financial technology industry has clearly defined the overall development direction of TO B, and financial institutions have begun to embrace technology with great eagerness. After more than a year of concussion, Pintec Technology Holdings restarted, and after bitterly determined to completely decouple from the P2P industry customer building block box at the cost of hundreds of millions of bad debts and get rid of the historical burden, Pintec Technology Holdings recently announced the formal appointment of Li Huike as the company's CEO, while Wei Wei and Dong Jun left the company's management and completed the strategic deployment in terms of personnel.
The financial technology solution service provider, which was the first to open TO B service, officially opened a second "start-up" trip.
Change often starts from the "head". Since Li Huike, former executive vice president of Pintec Technology Holdings, officially took over as CEO, let's take a look at the strategic direction and future development path of this company.
There are already traces of business data in changing the coach.
As a matter of fact, the change of coach has been found in Pintec Technology Holdings's financial report in 2019. According to the financial report, "in order to better promote the 'five major technology enabling businesses' strategy, Pintec Technology Holdings has recently appointed Victor Li as executive vice president of the company, responsible for the day-to-day business management of the company. It can also be seen from this appointment that Pintec Technology Holdings has gradually passed the adjustment period of last year and has been on track in terms of personnel and business, "and this has laid the groundwork for today's changes.
According to the data, Li Huike was the co-founder of InfraRisk in Australia and joined the company after being acquired by Pintec Technology Holdings. He has held a number of senior executive positions in China and Australia and has more than 20 years of experience in building and commercializing the most advanced technology. at the same time, he also has extensive industry experience in the fields of research and development, consulting, business development and management.
InfraRisk was founded in November 2008, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, mainly including Australian banks,ToyotaA number of financial institutions, including finance, provide process management systems for personal credit and corporate credit, covering Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Asia and the Middle East.
Since Li Huike joined Pintec Technology Holdings, in 2019, Pintec Technology Holdings's technology-enabled business continued to push through the old and bring forth the new, and successively announced the launch of the CVX enterprise credit management system.Huamei BankBuild digital bank, subsidiary PIVOT to implement wealth management business in Southeast Asia. In 2020, Pintec Technology Holdings CVX system landed in Didi Group, and continued to launch RPA (Robot process Automation) solution, set up RPA Innovation Center in Shanghai, and carried out strategic cooperation with Automation Anywhere,Blue Prism and other international RPA giants.
Judging from his resume and service experience with Pintec Technology Holdings, Li Huike's advantage is not the lending business that most Chinese financial technology companies are good at, but technical services for financial institutions. As some experts have pointed out, the business model and management structure of providing technical services to financial institutions are very different from loan services, and Li Huike's decades of business relations and service experience with domestic and foreign financial giants is undoubtedly the right person to lead Pintec Technology Holdings to achieve the established strategy.
For Li Huike to succeed Pintec Technology Holdings CEO, experts said that to some extent, this means that a "brand new" Pintec Technology Holdings is being born.
The management stabilizes the road of starting a second "business".
In fact, with stricter supervision and ever-changing conditions in the industry, Pintec Technology Holdings also had to seek a second "entrepreneurial" road.
The first is the "separation" from the past business cooperation model. As "de-financialization" has gradually become a trend in the industry, Pintec Technology Holdings, who has been committed to technical services, is also in constant adjustment. Pintec Technology Holdings announced the positioning of "science and technology empowerment" after its establishment in 2016, but Pintec Technology Holdings's profitability has always been questioned because the business partners of technical services include the much-questioned P2P industry.
In 2020, with the withdrawal of P2P from related parties, Pintec Technology Holdings handed in a less-than-satisfactory "report card", "strong man with broken wrists" to bid farewell to P2P business customers.
According to its 2019 financial report data, in terms of net profit, as the related party P2P announced the withdrawal, the company assessed that its claims were no longer recoverable, and all the impairment was included in the current management expenses, resulting in a substantial increase in operating expenses, resulting in an adjusted net profit of 888.6 million from a profit of 133.4 million in 2018.
Where there are losses, there are gains. At the same time, Pintec Technology Holdings also makes great efforts to optimize the business structure and improve profitability. As can be seen from the 2019 financial report, although Pintec Technology Holdings's management expenses rose sharply in 2019, the annual direct cost payment decreased by 29% compared with the same period last year. Of this total, sales and marketing expenditure fell to 696 million yuan, a decrease of 30.2%. In the optimized product portfolio, with the effective control of costs and expenses, as well as the improvement of market bargaining power, Pintec Technology Holdings's gross profit margin rose to 40.1% in 2019 from 32.4% in 2018.
Pintec Technology Holdings said that although the impairment had a negative impact on the company's revenue in 2019, the impact was non-cash and one-off, eliminating a long-term adverse factor affecting the company's development and valuation. it is conducive for the company to focus on risk-free technology enabling business and enter a new growth cycle.
At the same time, as for the business layout, in the 2019 financial report, Pintec Technology Holdings revealed that he will continue to empower science and technology through five core businesses, including digital retail credit solutions, digital enterprise credit solutions, digital wealth management solutions, financial RPA automation solutions, and financial digital transformation services.
With 20 years of experience in enabling science and technology, how will Li Huike take the helm?
In September 2019, Pintec Technology Holdings's former CEO Wei Wei announced that he would be on leave due to illness, and Dong Jun would act as acting CEO for Pintec Technology Holdings. Dong Jun is also chairman of Building Block Jigsaw Group. Although there is no legal problem with this identity, "P2P related party" has also become a controversial tag for Pintec Technology Holdings. The appointment of Dr. Li Huike to Pintec Technology Holdings CEO is the last hammer to complete Pintec Technology Holdings's adjustment.
Reform always goes through a "period of labor pains". For Pintec Technology Holdings, a high-cost "break-off" means the beginning of a new era, and a second "entrepreneurial" trip that belongs to it has come. The succession of Li Huike is the "starting point" of Pintec Technology Holdings's brand-new road.
For Li Huike, who has more than 20 years of experience in the field of scientific and technological empowerment, titanium at the helm is also a fit. From the university in the 1990s to a new understanding of AI, to the in-depth understanding and exploration after entering practice, and then to the innovative application under the tide of science and technology, Li Huike witnessed almost every important moment in the era of scientific and technological empowerment, and also participated in many failed or successful cases.
As he said in an interview with the media, "it is very respectable to make breakthroughs through research and development and through technological maturity. In many cases, investment in research may be wasted in the short term, but in the long run, this is the real driving force of scientific and technological progress and the backbone of science and technology." But this road is often a long way to go, and general technological progress requires a longer cycle, and sometimes even major breakthroughs in the basic theory behind it. "
In Li Huike's view, the future Pintec Technology Holdings will mainly have two types of business, one is digital technology services, which includes various export solutions, such as smart credit, wealth management, corporate credit, RPA and so on. The other is digital operation service, which is the financial business carried out by the company's small loans, factoring and other licenses, which serves as the basis for the company to carry out operational cooperation with financial institutions.
Li Huike said that digital technical services and digital operation services are the two legs that support the development of titanium products. These two businesses cooperate with each other to make customers not only achieve technical digitization, but also achieve business digitization, and then achieve commercial success, thus Pintec Technology Holdings will realize his mission and become the engine to start the future finance.
Conclusion
The things in the world can be changed and understood for a long time.
In the face of the turbulence of the industry and the depression of the market in recent years, only "change" can last. Whether it is high-cost separation from related parties, or deepening the science and technology enabling business and creating five major scientific and technological enabling programs, it is a brand-new start and opportunity for Pintec Technology Holdings.
Of course, change comes with challenges. From the point of view of the industry, there were Internet giants Ant Financial Services Group,JingDongMathematics and other division of food, after the pursuit of more third-party financial technology service providers, how to seize the market is one of the problems that Pintec Technology Holdings is currently facing. At the same time, in the face of major adjustments in personnel and management, how to walk out of the road of characteristic development is the second problem that Pintec Technology Holdings faces.
Li Huike once said in an interview that abandoning some unpromising businesses, getting rid of the unfavorable factors affecting the company's development, and greatly reducing costs, in fact, the result is a more financially healthy and sustainable business environment with a more capable company structure and personnel. And all this is an important guarantee for the future development of the company.