JD Finance, the financial subsidiary of China's second biggest e-commerce player JD.com Inc, launched an enterprise-level cloud services platform on Monday, by leveraging its big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence to better serve financial institutions.

The cloud platform offers intelligent risk control, intelligent investment advisory, intelligent payment and transaction by virtue of face recognition technology, graph calculation and other AI technologies to enhance the work efficiency for financial institutions, said JD Finance.

"We define JD Finance as a partner, but not a subverter to the financial institutions. We help banks improve their efficiencies in credit authorization by more than 10 times and reduce the costs by 70 percent, and by virtue of our AI technologies, the ratio of bad loans and capital loss rate is nearly 50 percent lower than the industry average," said Liu Qiangdong, founder and CEO of JD.com.

Liu said AI is a kind of technology and a way of thinking, as well as a core force to make innovations in various industries in the next 20 years, adding the financial sector is an important application field for AI.

"JD Finance aims to build up an ecosystem based on its capabilities in big data and AI," he said.

"The financial industry is one of the best industries to apply AI as it is highly digitalized. AI could serve financial institutions in the fields of identity authorization, risk control, market analysis and investment strategy planning, to help them save resources and enhance work efficiency," said Shen Nanpeng, founding and managing partner of investment firm Sequoia Capital China.

Shen said the global AI market is witnessing a boom with the annual investment in the sector reaching $30 billion. In China, AI investment has surpassed $8 billion, with over 1,000 startups.

Chen Shengqiang, CEO of JD Finance, said in an earlier interview that JD Finance provides enterprise services to financial institutions instead of conducting financial business.

Established in 2013, JD Finance offers sophisticated financial solutions including consumer credit, supply chain financing, asset management, payment solutions and crowdfunding.

It leverages a vast array of transaction and customer data to build complex credit and risk control models.

In June, JD completed the spinoff of JD Finance after first announcing its intentions to do so in March this year.

Apart from JD Finance, Ant Financial Services Group, the financial affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, also enables individuals and businesses to execute payments online in a secure manner.

fanfeifei@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/07/2017 page13)