A leading online lender in China has revealed the unorthodox extent to which the country’s booming fintech sector uses personal information to assess credit risk — including examining social media contact lists.
“If we find you are [social media] friends with celebrities from the entertainment or finance industries, we think you must be to some extent trustworthy . . . since otherwise you wouldn’t have such friends,” said Jesse Chen, co-founder of Jubao Internet Technology, one of China’s top three peer-to-peer lending firms.
Jubao, along with Tencent, is among a new wave of Chinese online finance firms using social media data to assess credit risk.