Author | Xiao Hui
Source | A mutual golden goose
Recently, a small bank in the eastern region decided to withdraw from the "micro loan joint loan" business in cooperation with WeBank.
Like most banks, the bank's co-lending business with WeBank began in 2018, when the development of WeLoan's co-lending business was in full swing, and many banks relied on WeBank's "WeLoan Co-loan" personal loan business to skyrocket. At that time, the regulatory requirements for the contribution ratio of joint loans had not yet been introduced, and the contribution ratio of most cooperative banks and WeBank was 99%:1%, and the same was true for the bank, and the contribution ratio was adjusted to 90%:10% after that.
In December 2021, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) mentioned in the Notice on Further Regulating the Internet Lending Business of Commercial Banks that if a commercial bank and a cooperative institution jointly fund and issue Internet loans, they should strictly implement the requirements for the management of the capital contribution ratio, and the capital contribution ratio of the partner in a single loan shall not be less than 30%.
Since then, the ratio of the bank's investment in the joint loan business with WeBank has been changed to 70%:30%.
As of April 2024, the bank has been carrying out joint lending business with WeBank for more than 5 years, and at its peak, the balance of this business was about 2 billion.
The balance of 2 billion yuan is indeed very small in the entire consumer financial market, and it is even inferior to the balance increase of some head loan platforms for more than a month. (For example, the annual balance of Qifu Technology will increase by 23 billion yuan in 2023, that is, the average monthly new balance is 1.9 billion yuan) However, for a bank with assets of more than 100 billion yuan, the "micro loan joint loan business" is still the asset channel that ranks relatively high among its banks.
01
Three reasons for withdrawing from the syndicated loan business
It is not surprising that any bank will go online or offline according to its own development, but if most banks have the same adjustment, the reasons behind it are also worth paying attention to, and even reflect a certain market trend.
According to the relevant sources of the above-mentioned banks, it is not only one bank that has withdrawn from the joint loan business of micro loans, but also other banks have started to withdraw last year and this year due to various factors.
In summary, in the past two years, the cooperative bank has withdrawn from the "micro loan joint loan" business cooperation with WeBank, probably for three reasons:
First, the risks are rising
In the past two years, macroeconomic growth has slowed down, and the risk of the banking industry has risen. WeBank's 2023 financial report has not yet been disclosed, and its NPL ratio in the first half of 2023 is 1.47%, the same as at the end of 2022, unchanged, and the provision coverage ratio decreased from 413.99% at the end of 2022 to 375.19% at the end of June 2023.
Of course, WeBank, as a leading private bank, is at the leading level in the industry in terms of overall risk control. However, it is difficult to say that the current real asset quality will remain the same compared to the asset quality of the past few years.
A small change, previously mentioned in a related article - the president of WeBank said in an interview with the media in December last year: WeBank has never had outlets, but now it no longer deliberately pursues complete self-help. Based on the differentiated needs of the customer group, appropriate human service intervention is required.
If a product that has always pursued Internet big data risk control begins to intervene in manual approval, to a certain extent, it can also indicate that its original business risk has changed, and 100% big data risk control is not so easy to use, and it is necessary to intervene in a certain degree of manual approval to ensure risk control.
Second, relying on the head bank is no longer a good business
The mainstream joint loan business cooperation in the market is basically a proportional contribution by the cooperative bank, in which the risk cost is borne according to the proportion of the capital contribution, and the income part is the interest income brought by the capital contribution, but a certain proportion of the "platform fee" needs to be paid to the core bank according to the actual interest.
If the current risk of the syndicated loan business increases, the income of the cooperative bank will be greatly reduced. The cost of capital for small and medium-sized banks is higher, and it is indeed not a good business to bear higher and higher risk costs in this business.
Third, the supervision is becoming more and more stringent
In recent years, many regulatory documents have mentioned that local incorporated banks are expected to serve local customers.
Article 5 of the 2021 Notice of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission on Regulating the Internet Lending Business of Commercial Banks mentions that cross-regional operations should be strictly controlled. Where a local corporate bank conducts internet lending business, it shall serve local customers and shall not carry out internet lending business across the jurisdiction of the place of registration. Except where there are no physical business outlets, where the business is mainly carried out online, and where other conditions stipulated by the CBIRC are met.
Urban commercial banks, rural commercial banks, and private banks without Internet banking qualifications are quite sensitive to the Internet lending business.
In January 2023, Bank of Ningbo was fined 2.2 million yuan by the regulator for carrying out non-local Internet loan business in violation of regulations and failing to rectify the Internet loan business.
Knock on the key point: remote Internet loan business.
The above-mentioned bank-related person who withdrew from the "micro loan joint loan" business admitted frankly that in the past two years, the local regulator has repeatedly emphasized the territorial development of business, and has begun to investigate whether the relevant Internet loan business has cross-regional operation.
Although in the syndicated loan business, it is not difficult to distinguish the customer's location and then match the assets to the cooperative bank where the customer is located.
However, in practice, there may be problems such as a small number of customers in a certain region, or a difference between the risk qualification of customers and the risk appetite of the local cooperative bank, which will lead to an imbalance in asset matching.
It is actually very difficult for urban commercial banks, rural commercial banks, and private banks without Internet banking qualifications to ensure that they serve local customers and operate in compliance with regulations.
02
WeBank's troubles
It may not only be local incorporated banks that are difficult.
WeBank should be harder.
Recently, market participants close to WeBank revealed to a mutual golden goose that the balance of micro loans at the end of the first quarter of this year has decreased compared with the beginning of the year, reducing the balance by more than 20 billion yuan.
It is conceivable that the consumer loan market in the first quarter is still not optimistic.
There are many reasons for the decrease in the balance of general bank loans, which may be that banks have taken into account the requirements of capital adequacy ratio and temporarily restricted the growth of loan scale.
In the past March, WeBank changed its registered capital to 3.9182 billion yuan. Prior to this, WeBank's registered capital was 3.85 billion yuan.
However, the most likely reason for this environment may be that the current macroeconomic development is less than expected, as mentioned above, the financial situation of most borrowers is poor, the ability to repay loans is weakened, and the risk of banks is rising. Banks reduce lending for risk control reasons, especially when they observe an increase in loan defaults, and as a result, balances will also fall.
Another interesting phenomenon is that it has recently been found that WeLoan has begun to look for third-party traffic cooperation, and has begun to divert traffic for WeLoan in third-party APP.
Screenshot from: Jianying APP
For a long time, backed by WeChat's more than 1.3 billion monthly active users, WeLoan's exclusive prime position of "WeChat service" has been the envy of others. However, from another point of view, it is also a high dependence on a single channel.
There is no doubt that WeLoan should also be caught in traffic anxiety.
What's even more noteworthy is that today's data security is becoming more and more regulated.
WeChat or QQ can be regarded as a third-party cooperation platform of WeBank.
In 2017, Tencent staff publicly stated: "Tencent has accumulated a lot of user data in different scenarios, including each user's social relationship, payment behavior, past repayment ability, etc. Tencent Cloud has cooperated with WeBank's WeLoan team to support WeBank's WeLoan products to achieve accurate risk control and management through a series of rich data and algorithm modeling, greatly reducing the overdue rate and bad debt rate of WeLoan. ”
So, nowadays, when WeLoan calls WeChat or QQ, these external third-party data should also be "disconnected and directly connected" through credit bureaus?
Partner withdrawal, rising risk, traffic anxiety...... There are a lot of troubles on the head platform, is the situation of other platforms more worrying?