JD Finance CEO Chen Shengqian revealed that the company's joint venture with ZestFinance, an American Internet financial company specializing in data risk control models, will soon be opened in China.
JD Finance invested in ZestFinance in June 2015 and the two parties announced plans to establish a joint venture named JD-ZestFinance Gaia to support the development of consumer credit services in China. The JV will leverage ZestFinance's machine learning-based credit-decision technology and JD's reservoir of big data consumer data to provide credit risk evaluation services to companies in China.
Founded in Los Angeles in September 2009, ZestFinance was originally known as ZestCash. Its co-founders are Google's former vice president Douglas Merrill and Capital One's former senior director of credit Shawn Budde. The company uses machine learning and data science to help companies make more accurate financial decisions. The result is increased credit availability for borrowers and higher repayment rates for lenders.
So far, JD Finance has seven major business sectors, including payment, supply chain finance, consumer finance, wealth management, crowd-funding, insurance, and securities.
It is still unclear under what type of business license and capitalization the ZestFinance JV will be formed. And no further financial terms of the deal have been released by JD.com or JD Finance.