Jack Ma’s online bank is leading a quiet revolution in the way China lends to small businesses, taking aim at a credit bottleneck that has held back Asia’s largest economy for decades.
Using real-time payments data and a risk-management system that analyzes more than 3,000 variables, Ma’s four-year-old MYbank has lent 2 trillion yuan ($290 billion) to nearly 16 million small companies. Borrowers apply with a few taps on a smartphone and receive cash almost instantly if they’re approved. The whole process takes three minutes and involves zero human bankers. The default rate so far: about 1%.
The financial-technology boom that turned China into the world’s biggest market for electronic payments is now changing how banks interact with companies that drive most of the nation’s economic growth. As MYbank and its peers crunch reams of new data from payment systems, social media and other sources, they’re growing more comfortable with smaller borrowers that they previously shunned in favor of state-owned giants.
Let there be loans
“Small and medium enterprises are really the boiler room of the economy,” said Keith Pogson, a senior partner in charge of banking and capital markets at Ernst & Young LLP in Hong Kong. “It used to be a segment that banks thought was too difficult and too risky. But now they run their model and work out what the risks are so they feel more comfortable.”
China is quickly becoming a world leader in the use of big data and artificial-intelligence technology to make loans, according to Cliff Sheng, co-head of Greater China financial services at Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm. Among the country’s biggest advantages: it takes a more relaxed approach toward privacy than many other jurisdictions.
“Our legal framework and regulatory environment -- which raise fewer privacy concerns -- make it easier to generate a huge amount of data and thus provide an unparalleled testing bed,” Sheng said.
One uniquely Chinese source of information for banks is the government-administered social credit system, which is being tested in cities across the country as a way to reward good deeds and punish misbehavior. In one potential scenario cited by MYbank President Jin Xiaolong in a recent interview, a small-business owner whose social credit score dropped because he failed to return a borrowed umbrella would find it harder to get a loan.
But the biggest data trove may come from payments providers like the one operated by Ma’s Ant Financial, the biggest shareholder of MYbank. After obtaining authorization from borrowers, MYbank analyzes real-time transactions to gain insights into creditworthiness. For example, a drop in customer payments at a retailer’s flagship store might be an early indicator that the company’s prospects -- and its ability to repay debt -- are deteriorating.
The upshot of more information is a loan approval rate at MYbank that’s four times higher than at traditional lenders, which typically reject 80% of small-business loan requests and take at least 30 days to process applications, according to Jin, who plans to double MYbank’s roster of borrowers in three years. He said the Hangzhou-based firm’s operating cost per loan is about 3 yuan, versus 2,000 yuan at traditional rivals.