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Alibaba Data to Help Provide Consumer Credit Ratings 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. 中国电商巨头阿里巴巴集团，正在出于一个新的目的挖掘关于其用户网络消费习惯的庞大数据记录：为消费者提供信用评级。 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，由阿里巴巴创始人马云控制的私人控股公司蚂蚁金融服务宣布将推出芝麻信用管理有限公司，该企业将主要依靠网络数据进行信用评级。阿里巴巴将通过合同分享蚂蚁金服的部分利润。 Ant wants to attract the millions of Chinese who lack established, traditional credit histories. 蚂蚁金服希望能吸引的，是数以百万计缺乏受认可的传统信用记录的中国人。 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. 中国消费者是出了名的节俭；作为大型经济体，中国的居民储蓄率位居世界之首。消费者和小企业缺乏信贷途径就是原因之一。 “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.” “他们可能从来没有获得过银行贷款，也从未申请过信用卡，”芝麻信用首席数据科学家俞吴杰在一份声明中称。“不过，他们可能是活跃的互联网用户，经常在网上购物，按时对水电费进行电子支付，拥有稳定的居留身份，而且很长时间一直在使用同一个手机号码。我们在评估消费者信用时，会把这些因素和其他因素考虑在内。” 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. 可用于信用评级的信息匮乏，是阻碍消费者借贷的另一因素，中国没有FICO信用分或是像美国所使用的其他信用评级信息等强大的评级体系。截至9月，人口超过13亿的中国，只有4.36亿张国内信用卡在使用。而在中国央行中国人民银行所运营的征信中心的数据库中，只有8.5亿人的信息；这些信息可能十分有限，而且大多来自银行。 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. 蚂蚁金融服务集团确信他们能够提供更好的金融信息，使得中国各地数以百万计的民众更容易获得贷款，给寻求贷款的用户、筛选潜在租户的房东、评判追求者的失恋人士，以及评估求职者的雇主带来帮助。 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岁的马云正在改变中国以国有公司为主导的金融体系，这个新公司就是最新例子。芝麻信贷是八个新成立的私有信用评级公司之一，它们本月获得了中国中央银行的初步批准。中共领导层一直试图减少中国对由贷款推动的投资的依赖，不再把它当做促进经济增长的主要推动力，他们希望给予消费需求更多重视。 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. 芝麻信贷将在一定程度上通过蚂蚁金服3亿多实名注册用户——几乎相当于中国四分之一的人口——的消费及储蓄行为，确定信用评分。该公司还将利用3700万个在阿里巴巴购物网站买卖商品的小公司的数据，这些网站包括淘宝集市和天猫。 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. 芝麻信贷将会获得支付宝的支付记录，以及余额宝投资者的信息，支付宝是与eBay贝宝(PayPal)类似的在线支付服务商，余额宝是一家网络货币市场基金，其收益率高于银行储蓄账户，现在拥有大约1.5亿用户。 |
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