Alibaba and Tencent have been approved by China’s central bank to join eight other private organizations that plan to launch their own consumer credit rating services, VentureBeat reported.
The announcement said that these private organizations will be launching the financial services over a six-month period. And according to VentureBeat, it has been widely known that Alibaba has been developing Sesame with Ant Financial Services Group. Sesame is a credit scoring service that works by reviewing user profiles and behavioral data from Alibaba’s marketplaces. Alipay is another venture ran under Ant Financial.
The month following Sesame’s website launch, Tencent announced its own consumer credit rating service that would be launching, VentureBeat said, which is said to be tapping into the data of its more than 800 million monthly users. Previous to this move, only China’s government ran bank, state ministries and local governments would keep track of consumer credit records and that data was not open to the public. They also don’t have FICO score services like in the U.S.
TechCrunch also reported that Alibaba and Tencent are working to build private banks. Reports indicate that Alibaba’s bank will be called MYbank.
