Thinking more about Ant and its clash with Chinese financial regulators. A couple months ago the BIS published a paper explicitly comparing Ant Group's lending vs. that of traditional Chinese banks.

https://www.bis.org/publ/work881.pdf
Ant's use of more sophisticated underwriting tech (massive amounts of big data) reduces the importance of collateral in the financial system, since Ant is looking at things other than just 'how much your house/assets are worth.'
But it also reduces the role of collateral just by increasing Ant's certainty about lending (you only need collateral if you're uncertain about the outcome of the loan).
The conclusion in the paper is interesting. If collateral loses its importance in the financial system, then the central bank effectively loses a key component in how it influences the economy.
From the paper:
Obviously there are a lot of sources of potential tension between Ant and Beijing (payments, power struggles, even allocation issues!) but this strikes me as an interesting thought in light of the additional capital requirements reportedly being demanded by regulators.
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