How Ant Group is Revolutionizing the Credit Card Business
Ant Group operates a credit payment company Huabei. Huabei is a consumer credit platform within the Alipay app that supports Ant Group and its partners. It offers revolving line of credit for its users for their online and offline purchases.
Alipay is the largest third-party mobile and online payment platform in the world. It is used more than 5% of the world’s population.
So is Huabei just an online credit card withint the Alipay app? It has far more genius than that.
Data Science to Serve Underserved Customers
Traditionally banks often neglect customers groups such as students, home makers or small business owners that have no predictable income stream to be deemed as credit worthy.
The national credit system in China has limited coverage. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) had data on less than 70% of the population as of 2015, and only about one third had a credit history.
Huabei uses enormous amount of consumer behavior data and machine learning models to judge quickly if someone can be given the revolving line of credit. This allows many students, homemakers and small business owners to gain access to loans to make purchase, when the traditional banks are not willing to serve them.
