NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, June 15, 2015

Zane Wang Zhengyu, founder and chief executive of lending company China Rapid Finance (CRF), wants to redraw the mainland’s credit landscape.

Wang hopes to create the mainland version of the San Francisco-based Lending Club, which offers borrowers funds at rates lower than those charged by credit cards. Ideally, the model could help meet the financing needs of 500 million potential mainland customers, many of them borrowing for the first time.

“The time is ripe for major change,” said Wang, 58, who earned a doctorate in statistics at the University of Illinois. “The top policymakers have been fully aware of mainland people’s increasing financing needs, and we want to grasp the opportunities to create a proper business model to meet those needs.”

Leaders have promised to drastically reform the country’s creaky financial system by embracing the latest information technologies and giving market forces a greater role in deciding interest rates, leading to a boom in the internet finance sector in the world’s second-largest economy.