Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, mentioned in "From 0 to 1" that if a company wants to go from 0 to 1, the most important step is to think independently.
As a licensed financial technology company with entrepreneurial genes, Ma Ma Consumer Finance (hereinafter referred to as "Ma Ma Consumer") has truly experienced a transformation from 0 to 1. Sublimation and transformation.
Zhao Guoqing, the founder and chairman of Immediate Consumption, uses the concept of "technology" to participate in the market game. Behind it is the insight of independent thinking. In the competition for consumer finance stocks, the importance of technology in customer acquisition, risk control, and post-loan management is self-evident.
The rise of digital customer acquisition and risk control
A high-growth consumer finance company must acquire customers and funds in the scene , have core competitiveness in risk control, and core competitiveness depends on technology output capabilities. From the perspective of consumer finance participants, whether they are banks, consumer finance companies, small loan companies, or mutual financial institutions, they have to shift their energy from Fin to tech, using technology to break through customer acquisition and risk control bottlenecks to support revenue growth. .
The Internet of finance has broken the barriers to traditional consumer finance, and credit has migrated from offline to online, truly providing convenience for users to obtain inclusive finance. However, while the Internet is helping finance open up incremental markets, risks are also spreading. When the risk control capabilities of consumer finance providers cannot be improved, a sustainable and healthy profit model will be impossible.
Judging from the business development of licensed consumer finance companies such as Home Credit, China Merchants Union, and MaMa, the core of improving risk control capabilities is the basic capabilities of financial technology. This is also the key to improving risk control capabilities in 2017. Before and after the trend of the consumer finance market transitioning from the Internet to digitalization. With the support of financial technology, consumer finance companies have a starting point in risk identification, anti-fraud and other risk control construction, ensuring that asset scale and asset quality increase simultaneously.
Public information shows that in the five years since its opening, Immediate Consumption has implemented an automated, real-time, and adaptive risk control system, forming a flexible and iterative risk control strategy and thousands of people. Differentiated credit and risk pricing, it has built 100,000 risk characteristic variables, millisecond-level real-time data acquisition and processing, and 2,000 risk control decision-making strategies, decision-making flows, and data model artificial intelligence algorithms. In addition, it has independently developed face recognition and lip reading. Recognition, intelligent speech recognition, voiceprint recognition, OCR recognition and other general technologies. These risk control tools, combined with big data, can effectively identify borrower fraud risks and credit risks, and monitor risk trends before, during, and after the loan in real time.
In the post-epidemic era, consumer financial institutions’ understanding of post-loan operations and management has changed, and the need for intelligent and digital post-loan risk control capabilities has become more urgent. In terms of post-loan management, the intelligent post-loan integrated management system independently developed by Immediate Consumption is also quite bright compared to its peers.
Industry insiders revealed that the post-loan intelligent risk control system for immediate consumption includes an integrated management platform and decision-making engine. The post-loan management platform and the intelligent call center are connected to realize automatic connection between robots and human agents. The robot can both make outbound calls and accept incoming calls, saving agents time and improving business efficiency.
How to efficiently obtain high-quality scene traffic is also a major problem encountered by the current consumer finance industry. Leading consumer finance companies have built their own online installment malls, cooperated with leading traffic platforms to facilitate loans, and continuously optimized customer acquisition channels. In addition, the use of smart tools to enter offline consumption scenarios opens up opportunities for consumer finance companies to acquire customers intelligently.
Taking immediate consumption as an example, we launched a business model that matches the online trend of consumer finance - "AI Scenario Transaction Credit".
By embedding AI software and hardware into consumption scenarios and relying on user payment transactions, we can obtain user authorization and divert traffic to lending service scenarios. This business model not only reduces costs and increases efficiency for scenario partners, but also helps immediate consumption and quick online customer acquisition.
The essence of consumer finance is scenario finance. In the context of the widespread digital transformation of the industry, returning to scenarios requires consumer finance companies to have the ability to digitally empower scenarios. At present, the proportion of scenario-based consumer loans of most licensed consumer finance companies is less than 30%. With the deepening penetration of mobile payment, the online scenario-based finance space is gradually released, which will bring about opportunities for consumer finance companies to acquire customers.
The AI ??scenario strategy allows Immediate Consumption to handle a large number of users with loan needs with the help of smart hardware in hotels, parking lots, shopping malls, scenic spots and other scenarios. At present, Consumption Now has cooperated with 1 million merchants, and the number of registered users has exceeded 110 million.
Online customer acquisition and automated approval have gradually become the mainstream of the consumer finance market. Using facial recognition, machine learning, cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence technologies, consumer finance companies can not only process customer applications and approvals in batches, but also introduce intelligent tools such as robots to assist in post-loan management, taking into account efficiency and compliance.
The lifeblood of finance lies in technology
Since 2015, the penetration rate of consumer finance has increased rapidly and the scale has expanded rapidly. As of the end of 2019, the balance of consumer loans excluding housing loans and business loans was 13.91 trillion yuan, an increase of approximately 135% from 2015. At the same time, the growth rate of the consumer finance industry has continued to decline in the past three years, fluctuating in the range of 15-20.
The consumer finance market is moving from a growth stage to a mature stage, and it is no longer effective to make quick money just by relying on market dividends. Internal and external factors such as limited pricing space, proliferation of homogeneous products, and credit risks have forced consumer finance companies to use big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other technological means to improve customer acquisition capabilities, risk control capabilities, user experience and reduce operations. cost.
At present, banks, licensed consumer finance companies, and Internet finance giants have all set up financial technology departments, and many institutions have even directly changed their company names from "finance" to "Digital technology", such as JD Digital, 360 Digital, etc. Financial institutions All in Financial Technology have seen that the end of Internet finance has come and the trend of digital finance driven by technology has arrived.
However, in the consumer finance industry, there are not many institutions that can truly implement technology as a strategy. Most institutions choose the form of outsourcing and procurement to decorate the facade of financial technology. Independent research and development means a higher price for a financial company.
When talking about the technology construction for immediate consumption, Zhao Guoqing believes that insisting on self-building core capabilities such as customer acquisition, risk control, customer service, and post-loan requires more costs and cycles. , but it is conducive to immediately building a solid and robust digital full closed-loop capability and enhancing corporate competitiveness and sustainable development capabilities.
Public information shows that there are more than 1,000 scientific and technological personnel in Immediate Consumer Finance, and they have created more than 220 patents. The number of patents accounts for 70% of the entire consumer finance industry, and it has also obtained the National High-tech Award Certification of technology companies. From the perspective of technology input and output, Immediate Consumption is more like a financial technology company in licensed consumer finance, ranking seventh in the 2020 financial technology innovation rankings.
Facts have proved that consumer finance companies with the support of technological capabilities have continuously become smarter in customer acquisition, risk control, and post-loan management, and in this way they have taken the lead in the industry and maximized competition. cyclical risks.
After consolidating its self-operated credit business through financial technology means, it can also export financial technology solutions to the industry through an open platform business model, increasing B-end technology service business income.
From the end of last year to the present, leading institutions in banking, Internet and other industries have been rushing to apply for consumer finance licenses. The entry of more existing giants means that the licensed consumer finance industry Competition will become more intense, and the refined management capabilities internalized in financial technology have become a key indicator of the competitiveness of consumer finance companies.
Taking post-loan management as an example, how to truly achieve "thousands of people, thousands of faces", use refined operating methods to minimize the overdue loss rate, and become a consumer finance company issues faced by the company. The smart risk control system of Immediate Consumption can carry out refined stratification of borrowers, and has corresponding models for each overdue stage, such as the lost contact model, etc. These risk control models can output different portfolio post-loan management strategies to optimize agent behavior, such as the best number of calls and the best time to call. Spend Now has more than 20 models, more than 300 customer tags, and more than 600 refined post-loan strategies.
The dream of high growth and low NPLs in consumer finance has been shattered. As online becomes the main battleground for licensed consumer finance in the second half, it will be difficult to form a benign business through extensive expansion alone. Asset circulation. Only by focusing on intelligent risk control and leveraging scenario advantages and more cost-effective products to attract high-quality customer groups can we bring enough space and capital to the financial ecosystem.