Baidu Merges With Citic: China Opens-Up A New Door For Online Banking Market

Baidu is considered one of the largest search engine operators of China. In the tech world of China, BAT is a well-known acronym. BAT stands for Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent which are known as the biggest organizations of China. All of them have spread their businesses in different sectors and now Baidu is joining the league of online banking world with others.

In order to establish 'The Baixin Bank', Baidu has tied up with Chinese Bank Citic. However, according to Tech Crunch, "The joint venture is currently awaiting approval for a banking license so there's no confirmed launch date, but the bank will join other digital offers from Tencent, which launched China's first private online bank in January, and Alibaba, which saw its MyBank service go online this summer."

The involvement of Baidu in the financial sector will surely provide a new dimension towards Chinese economy. Becoming the partner of Citic Bank is another feather in their crown. Baidu already owns a massive community of trusted users and they intend to influence their user base to gain the reliability in the market.

The future of online banking is promising according to the experts and this field will expand with the passage of time. As per Finance Magnets, "The interest in financial services also comes as China represents the largest country of smartphone growth in terms of unit growth. As such, online banks which handle deposit, payments and loans have the potential of becoming in public demand as they migrate more of their life habits to their phones."

Baidu took this joint venture step only after Tencent and Alibaba launched their internet banking facilities and experienced success too in the financial sector. The uniqueness of Baidu-Citic collaboration is that it is a union of an internet organization and an already established conventional bank. This initiative will certainly help the traditional banks to match the steps with the modern world.

According to Forbes website, "Baidu Chairman and Chief Executive Robin Li hailed the new bank as the "first in-depth cooperation between an Internet company and a traditional bank." Not only that, both the companies cited that The Baixin Bank will offer unique financial products combining the knowledge of Citic's financial expertise and Baidu's information.

China is supporting the ever growing online finance sector and issued guidelines to clarify the responsibilities among regulatory bodies. The authorities think that this legal step will help the qualified economic foundations to form platforms for e-banking. Obviously, there is no doubt that the unification of Baidu-Citic will definitely bring some positive changes in the Chinese economy keeping the ultra-modern trend of web world in mind.