Harnessing Potential: The Asia-Pacific Alternative Finance Benchmarking Report

This report is a comprehensive survey conducted by a research team from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, the Tsinghua University Graduate School at Shenzhen and the University of Sydney Business School, in collaboration with KPMG and with the support of ACCA and CME Group Foundation

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The Asia-Pacific online alternative finance market, including peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding, grew 323% in 2015 to $102.8bn, led by a four-fold increase in China to $101.7bn, according to the first comprehensive study of the Asia-Pacific online alternative finance market.

The report describes the regulatory environment for alternative finance across the Asia-Pacific region as 'diverse and rapidly changing'.

While some countries such as Singapore have chosen to regulate alternative finance within pre-existing frameworks, others including New Zealand have created bespoke regulation.

And while surveyed platforms in New Zealand and Malaysia generally felt that existing regulation is 'adequate and appropriate', platforms in Japan and South Korea were more concerned that regulation is too strict and Chinese platforms generally felt regulation was too lax.