China's peer-to-peer lending platforms transacted 119.6 billion yuan ($18.9 billion) in October, notching another monthly record, a report revealed on Monday.
The monthly transactions rose 4.5 times from a year earlier and brought the sector's total value to over 1 trillion yuan so far this year, Online Lending House, a web portal that tracks the sector, said in the report.
P2P lending, which offers easier access and higher returns than bank deposits to individual investors, is likely to hit 8 trillion yuan in transactions by 2020, Yao Yudong, director of the Institute of Finance at the People's Bank of China, told a forum in Beijing on Sunday.
"Although the P2P industry is facing problems of risk management, the market needs more capital from private banks to support the demand for funds," Yao said.
The number of problematic platforms fell to the lowest this year when 47 were shut down in October, but there might be a rebound after more detailed rules are unveiled by the end of the year, said Ma Jun, chief research officer at Shanghai Ying Can Investment Mana-gement Consulting Co.
