Chinese banks seek new ways to promote Internet finance

Commercial banks are exploring new solutions to better serve farmers and small businesses by developing Internet finance in China.

Bank of Yingkou Co Ltd, a commercial lender based in Northeast China's Liaoning province with total assets surpassing 100 billion yuan ($15 billion), is looking for effective measures to have itself better informed about the financial demands and credit standing of rural households.

Lin De'an, vice president of the bank, said: "We provide farmers with agriculture-related information and preferential policy information through our online-to-offline platform. Later we analyze the farmers' feedback, along with their plantation area, production scale and the online transaction data of their agricultural products, to make a risk assessment before lending to them. We also invite village cadres to join us in making lending decisions. These measures combined help us lower financial risks and lending costs".

By the end of last year the bank's outstanding agriculture-related loans exceeded 13 billion yuan, benefiting more than 3,000 rural households.

Bank of Lanzhou Co Ltd, a mid-sized lender based in Northwest China's Gansu province, built an online investment platform together with the provincial government to help small- and medium-sized enterprises raise money from individual investors.

The bank is responsible for publishing risk management reports of SMEs on the platform for investors' reference. So far, it has helped nearly 4,000 SMEs raise 1.4 billion yuan via the platform. Loans to all projects were repaid in full when they matured.

Baoshang Bank Limited, a joint-equity commercial lender based in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, officially launched a digital banking platform in August last year in an effort to build an Internet bank targeting small corporate clients and individual clients willing to use online financial services.

Liu Xin, president assistant of the bank, said: "We decided from the beginning to provide financial service instruments that will satisfy the demands of emerging economic entities in different scenarios of the Internet ecosystem".

To achieve this goal, the bank established a digital banking department that is separate from the rest of the bank in terms of financial affairs, credit resources, risk management and staff evaluation.

At the end of last year, the digital banking platform had more than 300,000 users, with total assets exceeding 800 million yuan.