Balance-sheet financing is thriving in Asia, too. Tech leaders Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu each offer unsecured customer loans through their particular online banking institutions, MYbank, WeBank and Jinrong. Chinese technology leaders have actually aggressively pursued synergies between different divisions of the sprawling organizations. For example, Sesame Credit, Alibaba’s alternative credit scoring system, talks about the regularity and value of the customer’s purchases on Alibaba’s mobile payments platform Alipay to be able to determine creditworthiness.

With deep pockets and existing mobile repayments infrastructure, these businesses take over Asia’s non-P2P alternate lending market, to the level that smaller players have a problem entering it. Combined with federal government crackdown on P2P, this trend towards domination by a couple of organizations helps make the Chinese lending that is alternative less attractive as an investment than it may previously are.

Meanwhile, India’s alternate lending marketplace is in a much earlier in the day stage. (more…)