About Qiantang Credit

Qiantang Credit

Qiantang Credit Co., Ltd. (Chinese: 钱塘征信) is a personal credit reporting company based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Licensed by the People's Bank of China (PBOC), it is China's third market-oriented personal credit reporting firm, following Baihang Credit, approved in 2018, and Pudao Credit, approved in December 2020. The company has registered capital of 1 billion yuan — about 139 million US dollars at the time its licence was reported — and provides personal credit evaluation services to financial institutions and individuals.

Qiantang's path to a licence was the longest of the three bureaus. The PBOC first announced that it had received Qiantang's licence application in November 2021, in a bid closely linked to Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba. The licence, when it came, completed a restructuring of Ant's credit businesses that regulators had ordered, and made Hangzhou — Ant's and Alibaba's home city — the third home of a licensed personal credit bureau, alongside Shenzhen and Beijing.

Background: Ant Group and the rectification

To understand Qiantang, it is necessary to understand what happened to Ant Group. Ant, the operator of the Alipay payments platform, had built one of China's most widely used commercial credit scoring products, Sesame Credit (Zhima Credit), which was among the eight private pilots the PBOC allowed to prepare personal credit reporting businesses in 2015. Like the other pilots, Sesame Credit was never granted a licence of its own; instead Ant took an 8 percent stake in the consortium bureau Baihang Credit in 2018.

Ant's position changed fundamentally after the suspension of its initial public offering in late 2020. Financial regulators agreed a rectification plan with Ant, published by the central bank in April 2021, and in April 2021 regulators summoned Ant and other major platform companies with orders addressing what the PBOC and fellow regulators called pronounced problems in their financial businesses. The requirements included ensuring that all financial activities held proper licences and that personal credit information activities be conducted by licensed credit reporting agencies. In practice, that meant Ant's personal credit data business had to move into a licensed vehicle. Qiantang Credit was that vehicle.

The November 2021 application

On Friday 26 November 2021, the People's Bank of China announced that it had received an application from Qiantang Credit to engage in personal credit reporting. Caixin reported the announcement the same day, noting that a successful bid would make Qiantang the nation's third company allowed to conduct the data-intensive business. The Wall Street Journal's account, carried in international reporting, described the new company as part of the restructuring ordered by Chinese authorities for Ant.

The application disclosed the company's intended structure: registered capital of 1 billion yuan — about 157 million US dollars at November 2021 exchange rates — and a shareholding split evenly at the top between the private and public sectors. Ant Group would hold a 35 percent ownership stake, and Zhejiang Tourism Investment Group, controlled by the Zhejiang provincial government, would also hold 35 percent. Reporting at the time added that a vehicle associated with two Ant executives would hold 10 percent, with the remainder going to other Zhejiang-based companies. Caixin later observed that Qiantang's equity structure was expected to resemble Pudao Credit's — a state-linked anchor, a major technology investor, and smaller supporting shareholders.

The licensing decision

The application took considerably longer to resolve than Pudao's had. While the PBOC considered Qiantang's bid, the regulatory ground shifted: the Measures for the Administration of the Credit Reporting Business took effect on 1 January 2022, requiring personal credit information collected for assessing creditworthiness in financial activities to pass through licensed agencies, and fintech platforms were given until the end of 2022 to overhaul their credit reporting businesses into compliance. As late as June 2024, Caixin still described Qiantang as a company that had applied for a personal credit reporting licence and might become China's third such firm.

The licence was subsequently granted, and China's central bank was reported by the Xinhua News Agency to have licensed another credit-scoring company to engage in personal credit reporting, making Qiantang Credit the third company in the country permitted to conduct the business. Xinhua's report restated the company's registered capital at 1 billion yuan, about 139.3 million US dollars, and its purpose: to provide personal credit evaluation services to financial institutions and individuals. With that decision, the trio of licensed market-oriented personal credit bureaus — Baihang, Pudao and Qiantang — was complete.

Ownership

Qiantang's ownership, as disclosed at the application stage and reported by the PBOC announcement coverage, balances its two anchor shareholders exactly. Ant Group, the Hangzhou-based fintech company affiliated with Alibaba Group, holds 35 percent. Zhejiang Tourism Investment Group, an investment group controlled by the Zhejiang provincial government, holds a matching 35 percent. A further 10 percent was reported for an entity associated with two Ant executives, and the remaining shares were allocated to other Zhejiang-based companies.

The symmetry was the point. Ant brought the data, technology and consumer finance experience accumulated through Alipay and Sesame Credit; the Zhejiang state shareholder gave the bureau the public anchoring that the PBOC had required of every licensed bureau since it refused the eight private pilots individual licences in 2017. Neither side could control Qiantang alone, and the bureau's home province held a stake equal to its technology partner's.

What Qiantang does

Qiantang provides personal credit evaluation services to financial institutions and individuals. As Xinhua's licensing report explained, credit-scoring companies engaged in personal credit reporting analyse and judge an individual's credit status, in Qiantang's case drawing substantially on information beyond conventional bank lending records — the non-borrowing and alternative data generated by digital platforms and non-bank lenders. Analysts cited in that report noted that such companies must have stable and abundant data resources and possess effective data processing and handling technologies.

That description fits Qiantang's shareholder base. Ant's ecosystem generates payment and consumer credit data at a scale few institutions can match, while the bureau format allows that data to be converted into credit evaluations for subscribing banks and lenders under licence conditions — rather than being used inside a single technology group, the arrangement regulators had rejected. Qiantang thereby serves the same system function as Baihang and Pudao: it stands between the platforms that generate personal data and the financial institutions that need lawful, processed credit information about borrowers.

Regulatory framework

Qiantang operates under China's Regulations on the Credit Reporting Industry and the credit reporting business management measures in force since 2022. The 2022 measures clarify the boundaries of personal credit information and standardise the entire process of its collection, processing and provision. They sit alongside the Personal Information Protection Law, which took effect in November 2021, and the Data Security Law, together forming the legal environment in which every licensed bureau works.

On its licensing, Qiantang stated that it would carry out personal credit reporting services strictly in accordance with the law, so that data security and privacy are well protected. The commitment mirrors the conditions under which the whole sector now operates: the PBOC has consistently justified its slow, selective licensing — three market-oriented bureaus in more than six years — by reference to privacy, independence and data security, and each new licence has been issued only within a structure designed to guarantee all three.

Place in the three-bureau system

China's personal credit reporting now rests on a public centre and three licensed market-based bureaus. The PBOC's Credit Reference Center, operating the national financial credit information database since 2006, pools data from banks and traditional lenders. Baihang Credit, established in Shenzhen in 2018 and owned originally by an industry association and eight pilot firms, specialises in data from online lenders and other non-bank channels. Pudao Credit, established in Beijing in 2020 under a municipal state-owned anchor with JD.com, Xiaomi and Megvii as shareholders, had — on the PBOC's own figures — covered 157 million people and provided 1.013 billion services by the end of August 2022.

Qiantang completes the geographic and corporate triangle: Hangzhou, the home of Alibaba and Ant, joining Shenzhen and Beijing. Its licensing also closed the longest-running open file in the sector — the question, open since Sesame Credit's 2015 pilot, of how Ant Group's personal credit data would ever be brought inside the licensed system. The answer, delivered through Qiantang, was a bureau half-anchored by the state of Zhejiang and bound by the same 2022 rules as its two predecessors.

Hangzhou base

Qiantang is headquartered in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, and takes its name from the Qiantang River, the river that flows past the city and is famous for its tidal bore. Hangzhou is the founding home of Alibaba Group and of Ant Group, and one of the principal centres of China's internet and fintech industries. Locating the third bureau there placed the licensed credit reporting system in the city whose platform economy generates some of the largest volumes of the consumer data the system exists to govern, and gave Zhejiang — through its provincial tourism investment group — a direct stake in the institution.

Significance

Qiantang Credit's licence marked the end of the formative period of market-based personal credit reporting in China. With its approval, each of the three great platform ecosystems that had contested the field since 2015 — the consortium gathered in Baihang, the JD.com and Xiaomi partnership in Pudao, and Ant Group in Qiantang — had been brought inside a licensed, state-anchored bureau. For financial institutions, Qiantang opened a lawful channel to credit evaluations informed by Ant-ecosystem data; for regulators, it completed the architecture in which personal credit information flows only through supervised institutions; and for the industry, it confirmed that the PBOC's model — few licences, state anchoring, strict data rules — is the settled shape of personal credit reporting in China.