Coincidentally, after more than a year in charge of financial business, Zhu Guang, senior vice president of Baidu, directly faced the media for the first time, and his attendance was also related to education. In 20 17, Baidu Finance announced that it had reached a strategic cooperation with Xinhua Education Group, one of the largest vocational education institutions in China.
During the period, Zhu Guang revealed two important data-two "1 million": Baidu education credit service users broke through 1 million (more than 3,000 new loan students were added every day); In the next three years, it will provide vocational education credit services for 1 10,000 people.
Two "1 million", one summing up achievements and the other pointing to the future, can be said to be Zhu Guang's first weighty answer sheet. Only by comparison can we see its unusual characteristics.
First, SOFI, the most representative financial technology company of American education credit, was founded on 20 1 1, and it took five years to reach175,000 households (according to Wikipedia) until 2016/kloc-0,200/kloc-0.
Second, there are about 25 million students in secondary and higher vocational schools in China, which is 6.5438+0 million in three years, that is, the average annual penetration rate exceeds 654.38+0%. It should be noted that educational credits are not necessary. This goal may still be conservative. Take Xinhua Education Group as an example. Its annual enrollment is about 200,000. In just half a year's cooperation, the proportion of student loans has increased from zero to more than 10%, and the penetration rate of some campuses has reached 30%. Baidu has nearly 3,000 such educational cooperation institutions.
(Zhu Guang (left), senior vice president of Baidu, and Zhang Ming (right), president of Xinhua Education Group, attended the strategy conference)
Education has "positive externalities" in the sense of economics, and education credit can best explain the essence of inclusive finance, and its social significance is self-evident. With the rapid development of education credit, the commercial value of Baidu Finance, which came from behind in the field of mutual funds, is also considerable, which can be analyzed from at least three angles: product, ecology and mode.
First of all, the field of education credit is a gold mine, which helps Baidu to build a strong product brand. In the online loan market in the United States, student loans, consumer credit and small business loans are the three pillars. China's education credit market has great potential. Take vocational education as an example. In 2020, the overall scale is expected to reach 1.24 trillion yuan (including 264 1 billion yuan for vocational education and 980 billion yuan for vocational non-academic education). The penetration rate of financial services 1%, that is, the credit scale of 1 100 million yuan.
According to Zhu Guang's disclosure, IT includes MBA education, on-the-job language and IT skills training. Baidu Finance has completely established an ecosystem of educational financial services, with a single-day loan of more than 45 million. At this speed, the educational product line of "Baidu has money to spend" can form tens of billions of transactions in a short time. With the penetration of vertical fields such as tourism, home improvement and renting, Baidu has a great chance to become a first-line financial product with a scale of hundreds of billions, just like JD.COM white bars and ant flowers, which is of great value to enhance the overall cognitive value of Baidu Finance.
Secondly, education credit may become a huge entrance for Baidu to build full financial services. The life of young people in China is being fully financialized. According to the data released by Ant Financial, there is 1 person in every four post-90s generation. Grasping young people quickly, grasping their minds, accumulating the scale of users and expanding derivative financial services are almost the standard strategies of large mutual gold platforms.
Education credit is low frequency, but the unit price is high. For example, the unit price of New Oriental cooking school cooperated by Baidu reached 65438+8000-20000, and the unit price of Wall Street English reached tens of thousands. The high market share in the field of education means that Baidu will be the first large-scale financial service provider for a large number of young people, and this brand imprint is profound; Moreover, education credit plays a role in the appreciation of human capital, which has a closer emotional connection in users' psychological accounts and is also helpful to push more high-value financial services.
This portal model has been at least partially verified by SoFi. SoFi originally provided student loans for college students, serving with resources such as credit, career and alumni network. Later, the business gradually expanded to mortgage loans, personal loans, asset management, life insurance and other fields, and plans to fully launch bank accounts and issue credit cards in 20 17.
Baidu's financial industry has established the layout of the entire financial ecology such as baixin bank and Baian Insurance. Based on the division of pedagogy, serve the freshmen well and complete the transformation within the system. Baidu's entire financial ecology will benefit from the dividend of this group's wealth growth and service upgrade.
Education and professional background are an important dimension of risk control. Starting from this basic field, plus existing data resources and leading artificial intelligence technology, it will strengthen the advantages of Baidu Finance. As Zhu Guang said, "As long as anyone wants to improve himself through learning, he can find Baidu. The more financial services Baidu provides, the more it knows, and correspondingly, the more services it can provide. "
Thirdly, the practice in the field of education credit basically verifies the operability of Baidu's positioning as "financial technology" and adopting B2B2C mode.
Different from traditional cognition, Zhu Guang said in an interview that Baidu does not directly acquire customers, but mainly acquires end customers through institutions; The key of educational credit business is not personal risk, but institutional risk. The biggest source of risk is that institutions run away, close down or over-invest, resulting in students not finding jobs. As long as the institutions are excellent and students study well, the risk of default is very low.
Through traffic, advertising, word of mouth and other data (some educational institutions, 80% of enrollment traffic comes from Baidu search), and using artificial intelligence for data analysis, Baidu has the ability to identify the quality of educational institutions and the employment status of their students, and combine information flow with capital flow to serve students and create value for educational institutions.
In the field of education credit, Baidu has newly launched customized services for four cooperative institutions: brand display, intelligent customer acquisition, credit service and corporate finance. As long as Baidu's traffic entrance advantage continues to exist, its comprehensive service of "information flow+capital flow" has always had high competition barriers. Theoretically, this also applies to vertical fields such as tourism, beauty and decoration. It is entirely possible for Baidu Finance to leverage the power of merchants and eventually create a financial ecology.
According to Zhu Guang, Baidu used the assets generated by financial technology. At first, financial institutions held a wait-and-see attitude. Just one year later, a large number of institutions seek cooperation, which implies that it has done a good job in asset quality while expanding rapidly. In the context of "asset panic", once a solid source of funds is established, the business scale of Baidu Finance may increase rapidly. The "two 654.38+0 million" in the field of education credit is only the beginning.