Abstract: The answers to the problems about the development of internet finance must be found from its driving and innovation mechanisms and the evolution routes to its business formats. Reviewing the theoretical contexts of internet finance from the perspectives of platform economics and industrial evolution, the paper sets up the driving mechanism including system reform, technical progress, market changes and organizational reform, and the innovation mechanism integrated by data, rules and applications, then portrays the evolution route between the business formats of internet finance from the theory of ecological competition.