Soul Htite, the man who wants to shake up China’s banking system

Soul Htite, co-founder of the Lending Club, the world’s largest online loan broker, has a vision: to shake China’s regular banking sector out of its complacency.

Mindful that the nation’s shadow banking system charges “criminal” annualised interest rates of more than 40 per cent, Htite said “it’s my job to help traditional banks go digital so as to serve a larger base of mainland clients, particularly the small businesses and individuals”.

Htite, 43, was the president of technology at the Lending Club until late 2010 before he founded Chinese online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform Dianrong.com with lawyer Guo Yuhang in 2012.

“China’s P2P market is already big,” the chief executive of Dianrong told the South China Morning Post. “But what’s important is not how big it is, but how good.”

Dianrong is one of about 2,000 P2P players on the mainland that offer loans to clients via the internet.

Despite his experience with San Francisco-headquartered Lending Club, an established internet finance giant that links individual borrowers and lenders via the online platform, Htite said Dianrong was different business to the US firm.