Alibaba Group’s online credit vehicle has has seen its consumer lending volume rise to over 600 billion yuan (approx. USD$95 billion) according to sources speaking to Bloomberg.
During the period from the start of 2017 until March this year consumer lending by Ant Financial has doubled on the back of its Huabei and Jiabei units.
Sources said to Bloomberg said that the increase came despite Beijing cracking down on the asset-backed securities used to support such lending, as well as exorbitant annual interest rates of as high as 15%.
As a result of the crackdown on the creation of ABS by China’s online finance companies, Ant Financial has sold only 10.7 billion of the instruments since the start of the year, as compared to 31 billion yuan for the first quarter of 2017, and a total of 243 billion in 2017.
