About Baihang Credit

Baihang Credit

Baihang Credit Information Co., Ltd. (Chinese: 百行征信) is a personal credit reporting agency based in Shenzhen, Guangdong. Established in March 2018 under the supervision of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), it became China's first licensed market-oriented personal credit reporting company. Its creation marked the point at which personal credit reporting in China — previously dominated by the central bank's own database — was opened, in a tightly controlled way, to a market-based institution owned jointly by an industry association and the private firms that had pioneered commercial credit scoring.

Baihang's role is specific. It pools personal credit information from lending channels outside the traditional banking system — online lenders, consumer finance companies, microlenders and peer-to-peer platforms — and supplies credit reports, scores and related services to financial institutions. In doing so it complements, rather than replaces, the PBOC's Credit Reference Center, whose financial credit information database, in nationwide operation since 2006, draws mainly on banks and other traditional lenders.

Origins in the 2015 pilot programme

Baihang grew directly out of an experiment that did not go as its participants hoped. In January 2015 the PBOC selected eight institutions to prepare personal credit reporting businesses, in China's first attempt to launch market-based personal credit services. The eight included Sesame Credit, backed by the Alibaba-affiliated Ant Financial; Tencent Credit; Shenzhen Qianhai Credit, affiliated with Ping An; Pengyuan Credit; China Chengxin Credit; Kaola Credit; Intellicredit; and Sinoway Credit.

By 2017 the central bank had concluded that none of the eight met its licensing criteria. PBOC officials raised concerns about independence, conflicts of interest — each firm occupied its own business segment and had reason to favour its own products — a reluctance to share collected information with rivals, and weaknesses in privacy protection. Rather than licensing any of them individually, the regulator chose a collective solution: the eight pilot firms would be brought together inside a single new company, anchored by a public-interest shareholder large enough to keep any one of them from controlling it.

Establishment and licence

That company was Baihang. The PBOC granted its personal credit reporting licence in February 2018 — reporting at the time described the licence, dated 22 February, as China's first individual credit checking licence, with an initial validity running to February 2021 — and the company was established in March 2018 and opened for business in May of that year. Academic and industry accounts describe its founding principles as joint construction, mutual benefit and win-win cooperation among its shareholders.

The timing mattered. China's online lending sector had expanded rapidly, yet the borrowers it served were often invisible to the central bank's database. Contemporary reporting, citing central bank officials, noted that the PBOC's records covered only a fraction of potential borrowers, leaving hundreds of millions of people without usable credit histories. Baihang was created to close that gap by collecting repayment and credit data from the non-bank channels where those borrowers actually transacted.

Ownership and capital

Baihang was established with registered capital of 1 billion yuan. The National Internet Finance Association of China (NIFA), an industry association overseen by the central bank and other financial regulators, holds the largest stake, at 36 percent. The remaining capital is divided evenly among the eight former pilot firms, each holding 8 percent: Sesame Credit, Tencent Credit, Shenzhen Qianhai Credit, Pengyuan Credit, China Chengxin Credit, Kaola Credit, Intellicredit and Sinoway Credit.

The structure was deliberate. No single technology or credit firm could dominate the bureau, the association's plurality stake gave the venture a quasi-public character, and every major pilot firm had a financial interest in the shared platform's success. As later events showed, however, equal minority stakes also gave each shareholder limited incentive to supply the company with its best data or strongest support — a tension that ran through Baihang's first years and eventually prompted a restructuring of its shareholding.

What Baihang does

Baihang collects, organises and processes personal credit information and provides information and enquiry services, credit reports and scores, and other value-added offerings to subscribing institutions. Its data comes primarily from loan repayment information generated outside the traditional banking system: microlending, consumer finance, financial leasing, financing guarantees and online lending, including the peer-to-peer sector that was still large at the time of its founding.

Its customers sit on both sides of that market. Internet finance and consumer finance institutions contribute data and draw on the database, while commercial banks and other traditional lenders can use Baihang's records to assess borrowers whose histories do not appear, or appear only thinly, in the central bank's own database. Central bank and industry descriptions also envisaged the data eventually serving sectors beyond lending, such as utilities and telecommunications, though lending remained its core use.

Building the database

Baihang signed up its first lenders quickly. Within months of opening, 15 companies had fully connected to its system, including the US-listed peer-to-peer platforms Yirendai and PPDai, auto finance companies FAW Auto Finance and Dongfeng Peugeot Citroën Auto Finance, and Chongqing-registered small loan companies affiliated with Baidu, Meituan-Dianping, Didi Chuxing, Suning and LexinFintech. At that early stage Baihang had signed data-sharing agreements with about 120 further institutions and secured letters of intent from around 50 more.

Growth continued through its first year. By March 2019, PBOC deputy governor Chen Yulu told a press conference that more than 600 entities were connected to Baihang's personal credit database. The company itself reported information-sharing agreements with more than 700 institutions across microlending, consumer finance, financial leasing, financing guarantees and peer-to-peer lending. Later central bank figures put the scale in fuller perspective: as of the end of August 2022, the PBOC reported that Baihang had included data on 496 million people and provided 3.859 billion services.

The data-sharing problem

Scale on paper did not mean depth in practice. Reporting by Caixin during Baihang's first year described a bureau struggling to obtain the quality of data it needed. Around 460 million people in China — roughly a third of the population — lacked credit histories, according to central bank data cited at the time, and the alternative data that might have filled the gap sat inside the platforms of Baihang's own shareholders.

Caixin reported that, before a shareholder meeting in Shenzhen in 2019, Sesame Credit and Tencent Credit had not been sharing their data with Baihang, and that the bureau was left collecting mainly loan data. The episode illustrated the structural problem built into the 2015 pilot's resolution: the firms with the richest consumer data were competitors, each with commercial reasons to guard it. Baihang said at the time that it was working on ways to overcome those challenges, including testing the quality of the data it collected, and its shareholders publicly committed at the Shenzhen meeting to move forward in cooperating with the agency.

Place in China's credit reporting system

Baihang operates inside a system whose centre remains public. The PBOC's Credit Reference Center runs the national financial credit information database, in operation nationwide since 2006, pooling data from banks and traditional lenders on individuals and enterprises. Baihang was designed as its market-based complement, covering the non-bank lending world the central database saw least well. PBOC officials have described the two nationwide institutions as non-competitors with the Credit Reference Center, which they characterise as part of China's national financial infrastructure.

The wider framework is set by the Regulations on the Credit Reporting Industry, introduced in 2013, and by the Measures for the Administration of the Credit Reporting Business, which took effect on 1 January 2022. The 2022 measures clarified the boundaries of personal credit information and standardised its collection, processing and provision, and they required personal credit information collected to assess creditworthiness in financial activities to flow through licensed agencies — a change that strengthened the position of Baihang and its later rival, Pudao Credit, while obliging large fintech platforms to route credit reporting through licensed channels.

Restructuring reported in 2024

In June 2024 Caixin reported that Baihang was restructuring its shareholding. According to sources cited by Caixin, Shenzhen Investment Holdings, a Shenzhen state-owned enterprise, was expected to become Baihang's largest shareholder with a stake of about 35 percent, and Ant Group was likely to sell its 8 percent stake — held through Sesame Credit — to Tencent, which would raise Tencent's holding to about 16 percent. Caixin's sources attributed the changes to technical problems and to Baihang receiving less support from its shareholders than its rival Pudao, describing a fractured ownership structure behind its technical and funding difficulties.

The reported direction of travel was consistent with the pattern set by the licences that followed Baihang's: both Pudao and Qiantang Credit were built around a large state-linked anchor shareholder paired with a major technology investor, rather than a consortium of equals. Whether through restructuring or regulation, the model for Chinese personal credit reporting converged on state anchoring with private participation, not private control.

Significance

Baihang's importance is institutional as much as commercial. It was the vehicle through which China converted a failed experiment in private credit scoring — eight competing pilots, none licensable on its own — into a licensed national bureau for the non-bank lending economy. Its database reached hundreds of millions of people whom the traditional banking system's records barely touched, and its licence created the template, and the precedent, for the two market-oriented personal credit agencies that followed it in 2020 and after. Headquartered in Shenzhen, the city that has hosted much of China's financial experimentation, Baihang remains the first name in the short list of licensed market-based personal credit reporting companies in China.