Chinese regulators to push tech giants to share

consumer credit data: sources

[HONG KONG] China plans to push tech giants including Ant Group, Tencent
and JD.com to share consumer loan data to prevent excess borrowing and fraud,
two people with knowledge of the matter said, in Beijing's latest tightening of
scrutiny.

The plan, if implemented, would effectively end the government's laissez-faire

approach to the industry. Large Internet platforms have tended to resist handing over
their data, a crucial asset that helps them run operations, manage risk and lure new
customers.

Chinese regulators, including the central bank, plan to instruct internet platforms to
feed their vast loan data to some of the nationwide credit agencies, the people said.

The agencies, which are run or backed by the People's Bank of China (PBOC), will
share the data more widely with banks and other lenders to adequately evaluate
risks and prevent over-borrowing, the people said.

Ant and Tencent declined to comment.

JD.com and the PBOC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The people declined to be identified as they were not authorised to speak to the
media. Details of the regulatory proposal to include Tencent and JD.com in the loan
data sharing arrangement have not been reported.

The plan adds to recent proposals to sharpen scrutiny of the technology champions
and rein in empire building, mainly in the financial sector; the shift helped bring about
the dramatic collapse of fintech giant Ant's US$37 billion IPO in November.

Since then, the regulators have launched an antitrust probe into Ant's former parent
Alibaba and ordered the fintech company to shake up its lending and other
consumer finance businesses.

The latest regulatory proposal for internet companies also comes as Beijing grows
wary of loose risk controls at banks, mainly smaller ones, in terms of consumer loans
and their excessive reliance on platforms such as Ant to find customers.

"Smaller banks are generally in a weaker position when they partner with fintech
giants like Ant. They have heavily relied on Ant's data to underwrite loans and
manage risks," said one senior regulator.

"When defaults happen, they have to shoulder most of the losses," said the
regulator, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter. "It's
crucial for lenders to have better access to more comprehensive and detailed credit
data on borrowers."
CUSTOMER CREDITWORTHINESS

The latest regulatory attempt would likely dampen the scale and profitability of tech
majors' credit businesses. That area is a cash cow, as the companies levy high
service fees on banks in exchange for access to millions of customers using
propriety data.

Via its super-app Alipay, Ant collects the data of more than one billion people, many
of whom are young and internet-savvy users without credit cards or sufficient credit
records with banks, as well as 80 million merchants, according to the company's
prospectus and analysts.

Ant runs Sesame Credit, one of China's biggest private credit-rating platforms, with
proprietary algorithms and methodology that score people and small businesses
based on their use of Ant-linked services.

The firm offers limited borrower information to about 100 banks, and takes the so-
called "technology service fees" - a 30-40 per cent cut, on average, of the interest on
loans it facilitates, analysts estimated.

Ant's consumer lending balance stood at 1.7 trillion yuan (S$349.10 billion) as of the
end of June, accounting for 21 per cent of all short-term consumer loans issued by
Chinese deposit-taking financial institutions, according to its IPO prospectus and
PBOC data.

Compared with Ant, rivals Tencent and JD.com run relatively smaller consumer-

credit business.

Tencent's private lender WeBank has operated micro-loans unit Weilidai since 2015,
which made over 460 million loan drawdowns worth a total of more than 3.7 trillion
yuan as of the end of 2019, according to WeBank's 2019 annual report.

JD.com's fintech arm, JD Digits, operates two platforms - Baitiao and Jintiao - which
had a combined 70 million annual active users and took in a total of 4.4 billion yuan
in technology service fees during the first half of 2020.

Jintiao facilitated consumer loans worth only 261 billion yuan in the same period of
last year, as per JD Digits' prospectus.