The Path to Improving China's Financial Regulatory Law under the Development of Digital Finance

Abstract

In the context of the digital economy, digital technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and blockchain are deeply integrated with the financial industry, giving rise to diverse digital financial formats such as mobile payments, online credit, intelligent investment advisory, and online wealth management. Digital finance breaks the time and space limitations of traditional finance, expands the coverage of inclusive finance, reduces financial service costs, and becomes an important force in serving the real economy and optimizing resource allocation. However, technological integration simultaneously reshapes the generation and transmission paths of financial risks, leading to new types of risks such as data leakage, platform monopoly, cross regional risk contagion, and consumer rights damage, which are derived from features such as mixed operation, online instantaneous transactions, massive data collection, and algorithm decision-making. This poses a systematic challenge to China's traditional financial regulatory legal system, which is centered around segmented operations, institutions, and post regulatory oversight. At present, China has issued a series of departmental regulations and normative documents to regulate digital finance business, but the overall legal system still has shortcomings such as high-level legislative deficiencies, mismatch between segmented regulation and mixed operation, regulatory technology lagging behind financial innovation, rough rules for financial consumer protection, and lack of cross departmental and cross-border collaborative regulatory mechanisms. This article is based on the basic theory of financial regulatory law, defining the connotation and three core regulatory objectives of financial regulatory law. Combining with the development practice of digital finance in China, it analyzes the regulatory legal difficulties brought by digital finance, sorts out the adaptability defects of the current regulatory legal system, and proposes a path for improvement from five dimensions: top-level legislative optimization, regulatory mode transformation, regulatory technology legalization, refined protection of consumer rights and interests, and multi-dimensional collaborative regulatory mechanism construction. The aim is to build a digital financial regulatory legal framework that is inclusive, prudent, clear in rights and responsibilities, and controllable in risks, balance financial innovation and risk prevention, promote the compliant and sustainable development of digital finance, and better play the fundamental role of financial services in the real economy.