From January to March 2018, Ant Financial has doubled its consumer lending operations via its Huabei and Jiebei units, in spite of the government’s attempts to reduce quotas for new asset-backed securities that can underpin such loans.
An affiliate of Alibaba, Ant Financial has more outstanding consumer loans than China’s second-biggest bank, according to Bloomberg.com.
China has been making it harder for online finance companies to create ABS (asset-backed securities), complex financial products that repackage debt to be sold on to investors. Ant Financial sold just 10.7 billion yuan of ABS in 2018, compared with 31 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2017, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Ant issued a total of 243 billion yuan of ABS in 2017.
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