Alibaba Data to Help Provide Consumer Credit Ratings
個人信用怎么樣？阿里告訴你

The Alibaba Group, the Chinese e-commerce giant, is tapping into its vast records on the online spending habits of its users for a new purpose: to provide credit ratings on consumers.

中國電商巨頭阿里巴巴集團，正在出于一個新的目的挖掘關于其用戶網絡消費習慣的龐大數據記錄：為消費者提供信用評級。

On Wednesday, Ant Financial Services, a privately held company controlled by Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, announced the introduction of the Sesame Credit Management Group, a credit-scoring business that will rely primarily on online data. Alibaba shares in some of Ant’s profits through a contract.

周三，由阿里巴巴創(chuàng)始人馬云控制的私人控股公司螞蟻金融服務宣布將推出芝麻信用管理有限公司，該企業(yè)將主要依靠網絡數據進行信用評級。阿里巴巴將通過合同分享螞蟻金服的部分利潤。

Ant wants to attract the millions of Chinese who lack established, traditional credit histories.

螞蟻金服希望能吸引的，是數以百萬計缺乏受認可的傳統(tǒng)信用記錄的中國人。

China’s consumers are notoriously frugal, with a household savings rate among the highest in the world for a large economy. Lack of access to credit among consumers and small businesses is one reason.

中國消費者是出了名的節(jié)儉；作為大型經濟體，中國的居民儲蓄率位居世界之首。消費者和小企業(yè)缺乏信貸途徑就是原因之一。

“They may have never obtained bank loans or applied for credit cards,” Yu Wujie, the chief data scientist of Sesame Credit, said in a statement. “However, they might be active Internet users who shop online a lot, e-pay their utility bills on time, have a stable residential status and have been using their mobile phone numbers for a long time. We will take these and other factors into consideration when assessing consumers’ creditworthiness.”

“他們可能從來沒有獲得過銀行貸款，也從未申請過信用卡，”芝麻信用首席數據科學家俞吳杰在一份聲明中稱。“不過，他們可能是活躍的互聯(lián)網用戶，經常在網上購物，按時對水電費進行電子支付，擁有穩(wěn)定的居留身份，而且很長時間一直在使用同一個手機號碼。我們在評估消費者信用時，會把這些因素和其他因素考慮在內?！?/p>

The availability of information on creditworthiness is another barrier to promoting consumer borrowing, which doesn’t have robust rating systems like FICO scores and other credit ratings information used in the United States. As of September, only 436 million domestic credit cards were in use China, with a population of more than 1.3 billion. While the central bank, the People’s Bank of China, maintains a credit reference center with 850 million people in its database, that information can be limited, and most of it comes from banks.

可用于信用評級的信息匱乏，是阻礙消費者借貸的另一因素，中國沒有FICO信用分或是像美國所使用的其他信用評級信息等強大的評級體系。截至9月，人口超過13億的中國，只有4.36億張國內信用卡在使用。而在中國央行中國人民銀行所運營的征信中心的數據庫中，只有8.5億人的信息；這些信息可能十分有限，而且大多來自銀行。

Ant Financial is betting it can provide better financial information that will make credit more readily available to millions of people across China, benefiting not only consumers seeking loans but also landlords screening potential tenants, the lovelorn sizing up suitors and employers evaluating job candidates.

螞蟻金融服務集團確信他們能夠提供更好的金融信息，使得中國各地數以百萬計的民眾更容易獲得貸款，給尋求貸款的用戶、篩選潛在租戶的房東、評判追求者的失戀人士，以及評估求職者的雇主帶來幫助。

The new venture is the latest example of how Mr. Ma, 50, is shaking up China’s state-dominated financial system. Sesame Credit is one of eight new privately owned credit-scoring businesses that were given preliminary approval this month by the Chinese central bank. The Communist Party leadership in Beijing has been trying to decrease China’s reliance on debt-fueled investment as the economy’s main driver of growth, hoping to shift greater importance to consumer demand.

50歲的馬云正在改變中國以國有公司為主導的金融體系，這個新公司就是最新例子。芝麻信貸是八個新成立的私有信用評級公司之一，它們本月獲得了中國中央銀行的初步批準。中共領導層一直試圖減少中國對由貸款推動的投資的依賴，不再把它當做促進經濟增長的主要推動力，他們希望給予消費需求更多重視。

To determine credit scores, Sesame Credit will partly use the spending and savings behavior of Ant Financial’s more than 300 million real-name registered users — equivalent to nearly a quarter of China’s population. It will also tap into data on 37 million small businesses that buy and sell goods on Alibaba’s shopping websites, including Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com.

芝麻信貸將在一定程度上通過螞蟻金服3億多實名注冊用戶——幾乎相當于中國四分之一的人口——的消費及儲蓄行為，確定信用評分。該公司還將利用3700萬個在阿里巴巴購物網站買賣商品的小公司的數據，這些網站包括淘寶集市和天貓。

It will have access to the payment histories on Alipay, an online payment service similar to eBay’s PayPal, as well as information about investors in Yu’e Bao, an online money market fund that pays higher returns than a bank savings account and has about 150 million users.

芝麻信貸將會獲得支付寶的支付記錄，以及余額寶投資者的信息，支付寶是與eBay貝寶(PayPal)類似的在線支付服務商，余額寶是一家網絡貨幣市場基金，其收益率高于銀行儲蓄賬戶，現(xiàn)在擁有大約1.5億用戶。