Simon Cheng, President of X Financial: China Has Bettered US in Fintech

SAN FRANCISCO, April 14, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Simon Cheng had already realized that fintech will change traditional consumer finance or overturn the public's consumer behaviors and even lifestyles back in 2015, when he still worked in a bank. Therefore, he joined a fintech start-up. With over 20 years' experience in finance, and "faith in data" established during his work at Capital One, he mapped out the outline of consumer finance for his company.

Not long ago, Simon Cheng, as the president of X Financial, shared his consumer finance practice in China at LendIt Fintech USA 2018. "China has outpaced the US in fintech in many ways, including both technologies and data," said Simon Cheng.

This is the best era for China's consumer finance.

The past few years have witnessed significant increase in China's consumer market. In 2017, China's retail consumption has reached $5.7 trillion, close to that of the US. It is expected that, by 2018, China will become the largest retail consumer market. However, the ratio of China's consumption to GDP is 20%lower than the world average. The US has relatively perfect financial system: Banks and other financial institutions are basically enough to satisfy the financial needs of users, meaning that fintech enterprises have very limited space to undertake innovations. But in China, there are still a lot of users who have no access to financial services. China's consumer finance market still has a promising prospect." Simon Cheng believes that this is the best era for China's consumer finance.

When most U.S. consumers are still using credit card for daily consumption, Chinese consumers are living in a cashless society. The development of mobile payment tools such as Alipay and WeChat Pay has predated that of the US. "Most users of X Financial are Chinese native to the Internet natives, i.e. the youngsters who has spent about 11 hours in surfing the Internet every day for almost ten years. They can't live without their smart phones even for a minute." Simon Cheng believes that the younger generation will develop a lifestyle of accessing to fintech services through the mobile Internet.

Fintech will be the best solution to bridge the gap in financial services.

Fintech is playing an increasingly significant role in China. Given that the demands for consumer finance are not fully satisfied and the credit system is still not perfect, fintech finds a great opportunity of enormous development in China where the data mining and processing abilities are booming and the mobile Internet market is leading the whole world. The fairly large market has the potential of bringing revenue of hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars. Fintech will be the best solution to bridge the gap in financial services.

The best solution requires an excellent risk control system. Simon Cheng introduced that, X Financial has created its WinSAFE intelligent risk control system by integrating the mechanism, culture, team, technology and data. This is a precise system where data flow is connected and mutually restrained and which is composed of a series of closely interconnected "parts", such as intelligent decision-making engine, data engine, anti-fraud model, credit model, and mortgage valuation model. Such system has greatly improved user experience, meanwhile ensuring safety and operation efficiency. The "data engine", an integral part of the WinSafe intelligent risk control system, uses AI technology to realize the fast submission of loan applicants' data. It also supports real-time cross validation between dozens of data sources and ensures authentication of applicants' data by means of the real name authentication, face recognition and living body identification. The data engine examines the risks by the "cross validation" between multiple data, thus able to discriminate potential risks to the maximum degree. Such excellent risk control contributes to the success of Xiaoying Cardloan, a geek product of X Financial. By the end of December 2017, its users have exceeded 10 million and the cumulative amount of loans issued was more than 12.8 billion yuan.

"Our mission is to create value and premium experience by intelligent financial services solutions and build an ecology of efficient financial services on the basis of Internet technology and data. We believe that we can create a better life for our users through fintech," said Simon Cheng.

SOURCE X Financial