The very first fin-tech academy is officially launched at Baidu Finance.

On December 14th on the Baidu FSG(Financial Service Group) First Anniversary Ceremony, the establishment of Baidu Finance Academy was announced. Baidu’s senior vice president Zhu Guang was appointed as the first principal.

“Our future development will be driven by the combination of the Internet and finance. Talents with the Internet industry background like us need to learn about finance, while finance talents will also try to learn more about the Internet industry, in hopes of bringing Internet and fiancé together,” Baidu’s founder and CEO Li Yanhong said, making his remark on establishing the academy.

The financial business Baidu is working on now is the company’s very first diversifying attempt. The idea first came along with the company’s charity endeavor. Baidu Finance originally provided young people with education loan in an attempt to help them get professional education. Today Baidu has achieved so much more with this idea and is driving it towards expansion, driven by technological innovation.

“In the past year, Baidu Finance started from scratch and made today’s accomplishment,” Li Yanhong said, commenting on Baidu’s achievements last year. “Baidu Youqianhua continues to lead in the credit and loan service for professional education market and has started to explore other vertical installment sectors such as house decoration and rental etc.”

Li Yanhong has high hopes for Baidu Finance. He holds the hope that Baidu’s FSG will one day become Baidu’s core business. Baidu Finance is going to look at industries from the perspective of the Wall Street and catch up with the influence that the Wall Street has in the financial industry with the Internet.

“Before I founded Baidu, I had worked at the Wall Street for over three years. At that time I interacted with many professionals there. And money is just like data flow for them,” Li Yanhong talked about his work experience at the Wall Street before he started his own company.

His first job after graduation was a senior consultant position at a subsidiary of Dow Jones at Wall Street. He also designed the real-time financial information system for WallStreet Journal’s online version. These experiences inspired him a lot when it came to starting his own company.

During the establishment ceremony of Baidu Finance Academy, he commented that Baidu Finance shares a lot of similarities with the Wall Street in thinking. People at the Wall Street deal with money, while people in the Internet industry handle data flow. From his perspective, Baidu Finance has both the money and data flow, which are the two most circulated things in the world.

“In the last ten years we have been dealing with the data mainly. We have formed a habit. We believe that products with a great data flow will have a very high success rate. A mass volume of data flow is a great power source that drives businesses forward. Baidu Tieba, Zhidao, Baike, and IQYI are also benefited from this perspective.”

As a matter of fact, Baidu already had finance-related businesses in earlier time. In late 2015, Baidu integrated its financial businesses into FSG and appointed Zhu Guang as the leader. This is no doubt the sign that Baidu is finally paying attention to financial businesses.

Compared with Alipay and WeChat, what cards does Baidu, a later comer, hold? The answer is AI, as Baidu Finance positions itself as a fin-tech company.

Fin-tech is a cross-sector emergence. It requires professionals to know both financial knowledge as well as the Internet, which presents a great challenge to the industry. On the other hand, finance is very complicated and can be divided into specific categories, and more questions will rise and finance and technology continues to fuse.

That said, there are quite a lot of people that know about technology, and people that know finance. But what we really need is people who know both. In this case, Baidu is going to nurture such talents itself and raise a talent pool.

As the principal of the academy, Zhu Guang has a clear vision for the organization: “Baidu Finance Academy is a platform for innovation and learning. It gives its students the chance to expand their knowledge base, boost personal growth and become a cross-sector fin-tech talents.”

“We hope to nurture several tens of leaders that can make it big in the fin-tech industry, and hundreds of professional managers that know both finance and management, thousands of talents that know both finance and technology. We want to be the the Huangpu Military Academy in the fin-tech field, and strike to upgrade our talent pool.”

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Translated by Garrett Lee (Senior Translator at PAGE TO PAGE), working for TMTpost.

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