Du Xiaoman Launches Personal Credit Rating Product Against Its Rivals

Du Xiaoman launches a personal crediting product named Panshi Xiaomanfen (磐石小满分) recently, aiming to cover the vast majority of netizens in China, combining generic portraits with financial exclusive portraits for credit quantification assessment, solving problems such as insufficient data of domestic credit application users and low credit coverage across the country.

According to Du Xiaoman, Xiaomanfen (short for Panshi Xiaomanfen) is a comprehensive evaluation system based on big data algorithm that can provide a comprehensive personal credit score based on users' personal feature, credit history, compliance, and other dimensions. At present, the credit score of Xiaomanfen ranges from 350 points to 950 points, and the Xiaomanfen users with a score of 700 or more will receive exclusive rights and value-added services in Du Xiaoman’s financial product. Xiaomanfen services are continuously upgrading, with a variety of credit consumption scenarios adding in its ecosystem.

After the launch of the Sesame Credit (芝麻信用) by Ant Financial in January 2015, at least 10 rating products have appeared in the personal credit rating sector. Below shows some key players in the market.

By comparing Xiaomanfen with other personal credit rating products, we find a great homogeneity between their rating metrics. Since most of China's personal credit rating products are drawn from the US FICO score and the German Schufa score for scoring system design. FICO's score ranges from 300 to 850, and Schufa's score ranges from 0 to 100. FICO's scores cover five dimensions: payment history, credit utilization, length of credit history, new credit, and credit mix. The information collected by Schufa includes basic personal information, rental records, criminal records, bills, and payment histories.

The players in the personal credit rating sector can be divided into two categories: players from traditional rating agencies and players rise from internet giant companies. The latter owns a huge amount of life-related credit data such as dining, shopping, entertaining, etc. These are called weak-featured data however can be more accurately applied in personal credit identification. Alipay, JD.com, Tenpay, and Baidu are all establishing their unique scoring system by big data analysis plus the traditional approaches.

It is generally known that personal credit rating products are not isolated, but can be inextricably linked with other business scenarios. Credit consumption, credit lending, and credit leasing have become three scenarios that personal credit scores can be applied. Therefore, the personal credit rating as a product itself is not as important as the function it applies in completing the closed-loop business model for companies.

Du Xiaoman, who separated from Baidu in April 2018, is the latest in the personal credit rating business and also falls behind its competitors in credit-related businesses.

An important reason for Du Xiaoman’s dilemma is that it is difficult for Baidu to obtain the identities of the user from its search engine, the main business in its own ecosystem. For Ant Financial, Alipay is acting as the huge entrance to different consumption scenarios through the mobile payment business. For Tenpay, the strong social networks it has built also leverage the ability in user identification and risk assessment.

What’s more, for Du Xiaoman, only obtain information such as the mobile phone numbers cannot effectively identify its users. Therefore, Du Xiaoman’s loan business is still at an early stage. Only after Xiaomanfen accumulating enough real-name account information, will Du Xiaoman have the opportunity to carry out credit businesses in various scenarios.

It can be seen that the introduction of Xiaomanfen is beneficial to Du Xiaoman after its independent operation to obtain informative data in the form of credit scores.

Du Xiaoman is linked to the Baihang Credit (百行征信) access system soon after its separation from Baidu. Baihang Credit is the first personal credit license issued by The People's Bank Of China (PBOC). National Internet Finance Association of China (NIFA,中国互联网金融协会) owns the largest share of 36% of Baihang Credit, other 8 companies including Sesame Credit and Tencent Credit, owns 8% of the shares, altogether making up the rest of the shareholders.

These eight shareholders of Baihang Credit are large in the market volume. Under the supervision of the PBOC, Baihang Credit is expected to establish a general personal credit rating standard applicable in the industry.