阿里巴巴網戀Lending Club
Ah, young love. Their public offerings barely past, China’s Alibaba and US peer-to-peer finance pioneer Lending Club have hooked up. Lending Club will offer working capital financing to US businesses that buy from Chinese suppliers on , an English language business-to-business website. The companies promise that an application takes less than five minutes, and offer up to $300,000 in funding. Monthly lending rates range from 0.5 per cent to 2.4 per cent (6 per cent to 32 per cent annually).
啊，年輕人的愛情。中國阿里巴巴(Alibaba)和美國P2P金融先驅Lending Club剛剛忙完了各自的首次公開發行(IPO)，就走到了一起。Lending Club將向從上的中國供應商那裏購買產品的美國企業提供流動資金融資。這家網站是阿里巴巴旗下的英文B2B網站。這兩家公司承諾，貸款申請流程只需不到5分鐘，貸款金額最高可達30萬美元，月息爲0.5%至2.4%（相當於年息6%至32%）。
It is a canny pairing. Alibaba contributes the borrowers, providing insights into their creditworthiness from online transaction history, and visibility on the usage of the funds. It should benefit from added sales on , which is one of its smallest online marketplaces (others include Taobao, a Chinese language consumer-to-consumer site, and Tmall, a business-to-consumer site). Lending Club, meanwhile, gets access to a pool of borrowers. Consistent with Lending Club’s model, the loans will be packaged and passed on to individual and institutional investors in the US.
這是一個精明的配對。阿里巴巴貢獻借款人，依據在線交易記錄提供關於他們信用狀況的信息，並提供關於資金使用情況的信息。這一合作應該能夠受益於平臺銷售額的增長。是阿里巴巴旗下規模最小的在線市場之一（該公司旗下的在線市場還包括中文C2C網站淘寶網(Taobao)，以及B2C網站天貓(Tmall)）。Lending Club則得到了與大量借款人建立聯繫的機會。它發放的貸款將被打包，然後出售給美國的個人投資者和機構投資者，這與Lending Club的現有業務模式一致。This is just Alibaba’s latest step into finance. Through affiliate Ant Financial it already operates China’s largest money market fund, with assets of more than $80bn. Last month, Ant Financial became the first of eight companies granted a licence to launch a credit-scoring service, Sesame Credit. It will benefit from access to data on Alibaba’s 300m consumers and 37m small business users — including visibility on merchants’ cash flows. In a market with short credit histories, and outmoded and disconnected data collection processes, the new business could change consumer finance.
這只是阿里巴巴進軍金融領域的最新動作。在此之前，它已然通過關聯企業螞蟻金服(Ant Financial)經營着中國最大的貨幣市場基金，管理資產規模超過800億美元。上月，螞蟻金服成爲中國8家獲發個人徵信牌照的民營機構中首家推出個人徵信服務——名爲“芝麻信用”(Sesame Credit)——的機構。芝麻信用的優勢是，它可訪問阿里巴巴擁有的3億消費者和3700萬小企業用戶的數據，包括關於商家現金流的信息。在一個信用歷史不長、數據收集流程過時且不暢通的市場上，芝麻信用可能會改變消費金融的面貌。
Although the new Lending Club partnership is initially limited to the US, it may well expand globally alongside Alibaba’s ecommerce business. Alibaba’s finance businesses are becoming an important part of its investment case. Young love can deepen into something greater.
儘管阿里巴巴與Lending Club新建立的合作最初只限於美國，但很可能會隨阿里巴巴的電商業務一道擴展到世界各地。阿里巴巴的金融業務正成爲其投資吸引力的重要組成部分。年輕人的愛情也可以發展爲一種更持久的關係。
