PayPal founder Peter Thiel 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, Immediate Consumer Finance (hereinafter referred to as "Consume Now"), established for five years, has truly experienced sublimation and transformation from 0 to 1.
Zhao Guoqing, founder and chairman of Immediate Consumption, participates in the market game with the concept of establishing itself through technology, behind which is the insight of independent thinking. In the competition for consumer gold stocks, the importance of technology for customer acquisition, risk control, and post-loan management is self-evident.
Digital customer acquisition and the rise of risk control
A high-growth consumer finance company must have core competitiveness in terms of scene acquisition, capital, and risk control, and its core competitiveness depends on its ability to export technology. From the perspective of consumer finance participants, whether it is banks, consumer finance companies, small loan companies, and mutual financial institutions, they have to shift their energy from Fin to tech, through technological breakthroughs in acquiring customers and risk control bottlenecks to support revenue growth .
The Internetization of finance has broken the barriers of traditional consumer finance development, and the migration of credit from offline to online, in a true sense, provides 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 cannot be discussed.
Judging from the business development of licensed consumer finance companies such as Home Credit, China Merchants Alliance, and Now, the core of improving risk control capabilities is the basic capabilities of financial technology. This is also the trend of the transition from Internet to digital in the consumer finance market around 2017. 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 the scale and quality of assets are rising simultaneously.
Public information shows that in the five years since its opening, consumption has realized an automated, real-time, and self-adaptive risk control system, formed a flexible and iterative risk control strategy, differentiated credit and risk pricing for thousands of people, and built 100,000+ risk characteristics. Variable, millisecond-level real-time data acquisition and processing, as well as 2000+ risk control decision-making strategies, decision flow, data model artificial intelligence algorithms, in addition to independent research and development of face recognition, lip recognition, intelligent speech recognition, voiceprint recognition, OCR recognition And other general technology. These risk control tools combined with big data can effectively identify borrowers' fraud risks and credit risks, and monitor risk trends before, during and after loans in real time.
In the post-epidemic era, consumer financial institutions' perceptions of post-loan operations and management have changed, and the need for intelligent and digital post-loan risk control capabilities has become more urgent. In terms of post-loan management, the smart post-loan integrated management system independently developed by Immediate Consumption is also quite bright compared to peer institutions.
According to industry sources, the post-loan smart risk control system for immediate consumption includes an integrated management platform and decision engine. The post-loan management platform is connected with the intelligent call center to realize the automatic connection between robots and artificial seats. The robot can not only make outbound calls, but also accept incoming calls, which saves time for agents and improves 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 assist in loans, and continuously optimized customer acquisition channels. In addition, smart tools are used to cut into offline consumption scenarios, opening the way for consumer finance companies to intelligently acquire customers.
Take immediate consumption as an example, and launch a business model that matches the online trend of consumer finance-"AI + scenario + transaction + credit". By embedding AI software and hardware in the consumer scene, relying on the user's payment transaction link, the user's authorization is obtained and led to the lending service scene. This business model not only reduces costs and increases efficiency for scene partners, but also helps to quickly acquire customers online for consumption.
The essence of consumer finance is scene finance. In the context of widespread digital transformation in the industry, returning to the scene requires consumer finance companies to have the ability to digitally empower scenes. At present, most licensed consumer finance companies account for less than 30% of scene consumption loans. With the deepening of mobile payment penetration, the online scene financial space is gradually released, bringing opportunities for consumer finance companies to acquire customers.
The AI+ scenario strategy allows immediate consumption to take advantage of smart hardware in hotels, parking lots, shopping malls, scenic spots and other scenarios to accept a large number of users with borrowing needs. Currently, Immediate Consumer has 1 million cooperative merchants, and the number of registered users has exceeded 110 million.
Online customer acquisition and automated approval have gradually become mainstream in the consumer finance market. Using face 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 life 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 operating 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 the way to make quick money solely on market dividends is no longer valid. Limited pricing space, proliferation of homogeneous products, credit risk and other internal and external factors are forcing consumer finance companies to use big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other technological means to improve customer acquisition, risk control, user experience and reduce operations cost.
At present, banks, licensed consumer finance companies, and Internet finance giants have all established financial technology departments, and many institutions even directly changed the company name from "finance" to "digital technology", such as JD Digital, 360 Digital, etc. . Financial institution All in Financial Technology has just seen the end of Internet finance and the arrival of technology-driven digital financial trends.
However, in the consumer finance industry, there are not many organizations that can truly implement technology as a strategy. Most organizations choose outsourcing and procurement to decorate the FinTech facade. Independent research and development means that a financial company will pay a greater price.
When talking about the construction of technology for immediate consumption, Zhao Guoqing believed that insisting on self-built 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 stable digital full-closed loop capability. Enhance the competitiveness and sustainable development of enterprises.
Public information shows that there are more than 1,000 scientific and technological personnel who are consuming immediately, creating more than 220 patents, and the number of patents accounts for 70% of the entire consumer finance industry. It has also obtained the certification of national high-tech enterprises. From the perspective of technology input and output, immediate consumption is more like a fintech company in a licensed consumer, ranking seventh in the 2020 fintech innovation ranking.
Facts have proved that consumer finance companies with scientific and technological capabilities continue to intelligentize customer acquisition, risk control, and post-loan management, and use this to win the industry's top spot and maximize counter-cyclical risks. After consolidating the self-operated credit business through financial technology, it can also export financial technology solutions to the industry with an open platform business model, increasing the revenue of the B-end technology service business.
From the end of last year to the present, there has been an upsurge in applications for consumer finance licenses by leading institutions in the banking, Internet and other industries. The entry of more stock giants means that the competition in the licensed consumer finance industry will become more intense, and it will be internalized by the sophisticated financial technology. The ability of centralized management has become a key indicator of the competitiveness of consumer finance companies.
Taking post-loan management as an example, how to truly achieve "a thousand people with a thousand faces" and use refined operation methods to minimize the overdue loss rate has become a proposition for many consumer finance companies. The Immediate Consumer Smart Risk Control System can refine the stratification of borrowers, and there are corresponding models at all stages of overdue, such as the loss of connection model. These risk control models can output different combined post-loan management strategies to optimize agent behavior, such as the best number of calls and the best time to call. There are more than 20 models, more than 300 customer tags, and more than 600 refined post-loan strategies for immediate consumption.
The dream of high growth and low bad in consumer finance has been broken. As online becomes the main battlefield for licensed consumer gold in the second half, it is difficult to form a virtuous asset cycle simply by extensive expansion. With smart risk control as the core, using scenario advantages and more cost-effective products to leverage high-quality customers can we bring sufficient space and capital to the financial ecosystem.