According to the traditional understanding, credit investigation is an independent third-party professional organization that collects and processes the credit information of natural persons, legal persons and other organizations according to law, provides services such as credit report, credit evaluation and credit information consultation, helps customers judge and control credit risks, and conducts credit management. It provides a professional platform for credit institutions to enjoy credit information.
The Relationship between Credit Information and Financial Risk Control
Credit information is closely related to financial risk control, and one of the important functions of credit information is to provide information services for the risk control activities of credit institutions. Credit investigation and risk control both involve the collection and use of information, but they are quite different. Taking the risk control of personal credit investigation and personal credit as an example, the differences between them include at least the following aspects.
Information is collected and used for different purposes. The purpose of collecting and using information by credit institutions is to share information among credit institutions, so that credit institutions have the opportunity to know the loan application, approval, use and return of loan applicants in other credit institutions. The purpose of collecting and using information by credit institutions is to decide whether to approve the loan application, loan amount and loan price.
The scope of information collection and use is different. As long as the customer agrees, the credit reporting agency can use all legal means to collect almost all the information of the credit reporting applicant. However, when collecting, processing and providing information, credit reporting agencies need to abide by the Regulations on the Administration of Credit Reporting Industry and other laws and regulations, otherwise personal credit rights and interests may be infringed. Therefore, the scope of information that credit reporting agencies can collect and use is much smaller than that of credit reporting agencies.
There are different authorized sources for information collection and use. The collection and use of information by credit reporting agencies requires the information provider (credit reporting agency) to promise that it has been authorized by the information subject. This is an indirect authorization. Credit institutions collect and use information by signing loan agreements with loan applicants or individuals who have obtained credit, and obtaining direct authorization from information subjects.
Information collection objects are different from users. The information collected and used by credit reporting agencies is basically through credit reporting agencies. The collection of information by credit reporting agencies includes not only the collection from credit reporting agencies and other data sources (such as public security, industry and commerce and other government departments), but also the direct collection of information subjects themselves. Credit institutions only use the collected information for their own use, and generally do not provide information to other external institutions except sharing customers' credit information with credit institutions.
The legal consequences of information collection and use are different. Credit institutions collect and use credit information, and mainly bear legal responsibilities to the information subject. Credit reporting agencies that provide incorrect personal credit reports or disclose personal privacy without the consent of the information subject may face legal risks. For credit reporting agencies, the information provided by credit reporting agencies is for reference only, and credit reporting agencies generally do not need to be responsible for credit reporting agencies.
The objective results of information collection and use are different. Credit institutions collect and use information mainly for their own risk control needs. By establishing a credit information sharing platform, credit institutions can share and query customers' credit information, which objectively not only helps to reduce repeated overdue loans, multiple liabilities or excessive liabilities, but also helps to improve the credit environment of the whole society.
Relationship between credit investigation and credit evaluation
Credit evaluation refers to the comprehensive evaluation of the ability and reputation of individuals and enterprises to fulfill or honor their commitments by professional institutions (generally not credit reporting institutions) using the data collected and summarized by credit reporting institutions or other sources and using professional judgment or mathematical analysis methods, and expressed by simple symbols or words. It can be seen that credit investigation and credit evaluation are upstream and downstream relations from the perspective of industrial chain. From a technical point of view, credit evaluation mostly adopts the techniques and methods of probability and statistics, while credit investigation relies more on it technology. Internet big data credit reporting is a combination of the two, that is, relying on it technology to obtain big data on the Internet, and then using probability statistics or machine learning or even artificial intelligence to assess credit risk. Most of the emerging Internet credit information is actually a credit evaluation service based on Internet big data.
From the perspective of serving customers, credit reporting agencies and credit evaluation agencies are external service providers of credit institutions' risk control. However, many practitioners often confuse credit evaluation with credit service, which easily confuses the boundaries between them. On the one hand, due to insufficient supervision of the credit evaluation process, personal credit information and credit rights have not been fully protected; On the other hand, the practitioners of real credit reporting agencies may not get due attention and resource support, which is not conducive to the healthy development of credit reporting in China.
Understanding of the current development stage of internet finance
After all, Internet finance is essentially finance, so the risk control tasks that traditional finance needs to face are roughly the same for Internet finance. Generally speaking, the forms of Internet finance include financial management, investment, credit, payment and crowdfunding through the Internet or the Internet. The demand for credit information service is mainly concentrated in the so-called asset side of Internet credit, and its development status can be summarized as the following main features:
First of all, the development of internet finance and credit business is still in its infancy. First, the business scale is still very limited, which is not enough to challenge traditional finance. Second, the overall professional level of employees is not high. Although some employees come from traditional financial institutions, the proportion and absolute number are not very high. Third, the quality of assets needs to be improved. Judging from the information disclosed by the online loan industry, the bad debt rate of Internet financial credit assets is generally high, and the assets are in poor condition, which poses a great threat to the healthy development of the industry.
Secondly, the service target of Internet finance and credit business is specific groups. At present, Internet financial credit service mainly exists as a useful supplement to traditional financial services, and its flexibility and inclusiveness play an important role in meeting the financing needs of farmers, low-income people, first-time entrepreneurs and people with unstable incomes. It is difficult for traditional financial institutions to provide perfect and sufficient credit services to this group of people because of service cost and service efficiency or benefit. The emergence and development of internet credit service institutions make up for this gap and gradually become a social consciousness.
Finally, there are many problems in internet finance and credit business, but the prospects are broad. Judging from the reality, it seems that there are many "buried mines" in the Internet finance industry at present, and organizations that "run the road" are also frequently heard, which seriously damages the industry image. But we should rationally analyze and judge this phenomenon in two. If we carefully investigate, those institutions that fail or "run away" are often not motivated by formal financial business, or even carry out "Ponzi schemes" in the name of Internet finance from the beginning. It is these black sheep that have caused the whole society's overall understanding of Internet finance to plummet, which has also had a great impact on the normal operation of institutions. Needless to say, the current social atmosphere is extremely unfavorable to the healthy development of the Internet finance industry. However, in the long run, after big waves, the Internet financial credit service industry will inevitably become more mature, its business will tend to be stable, its industry will be more standardized, its talents will be more abundant, and its service level and risk management ability will be continuously improved. As a new thing, Internet finance should be understood, tolerated and supported by all sectors of society.
Private credit reporting helps internet financial institutions control risks.
Internet finance urgently needs good credit information service. Internet credit service industry usually chooses to develop the credit demand of credit blank people (or high-risk people at the same time) first, but its lack of credit risk control ability leads to frequent problems in the process of rapid expansion. However, an important reason for the lack of risk control ability of Internet financial institutions is the insufficient attention and application of external credit information services, which leads to insufficient grasp of customer credit information and failure to discover potential risks in time. From the perspective of marketization, the lack of credit service infrastructure and risk management talents in the Internet credit service industry is a prominent problem at present. At present, the relationship between the national financial basic information database and the market-oriented credit service institutions is not clear, and the business boundary is not clear enough, which is not conducive to the market-oriented credit service institutions to provide efficient, convenient, safe and reliable services for the Internet credit industry.
Due to market access and other reasons, the capital cost of Internet credit institutions' services is high. In addition, most of their customers are people who are difficult for traditional financial institutions to meet the capital needs. They usually lack the necessary credit information, have weak repayment ability and relatively high credit risk. Therefore, from the perspective of sustainable business development, Internet financial institutions must charge customers higher credit service fees (or set higher interest rates). Higher capital prices or credit service prices make Internet financial institutions only attract more high-risk customers who are in urgent need of funds and drive away low-risk high-quality customers, thus forming a vicious circle of "low risk control level-high risk customers". As far as the current situation is concerned, the lack of a corresponding credit information service platform in the market to serve the entire Internet finance industry has also made the above risks worse. The same type of bad debts of a single institution and a single customer often occur repeatedly in other institutions, which leads to the high bad debts of the industry as a whole. It can be seen that the construction of a market-oriented credit service platform in the Internet credit service industry is very important for improving the risk control level of Internet credit institutions and improving the customer structure.
Specifically, the prominent risks faced by Internet credit service institutions in the process of business operation mainly include fraudulent applications, excessive liabilities, repeated bad debts and so on. A perfect market-oriented credit service platform is helpful to solve these problems. Practice shows that credit reporting agencies with flexible market operation mechanism can not only provide better credit reporting services for Internet credit reporting agencies, but also provide other risk management value-added services such as anti-fraud, big data query and credit scoring. According to our investigation and interview, the Internet finance industry urgently needs the supervision departments and industry organizations to strengthen guidance and support, and build a market-oriented platform for credit information sharing in the Internet credit service industry.