Beijing has pulled back on plans to license technology groups to develop “social credit” scores for consumers, based mainly on their online activity, amid concern over conflicts of interest, industry analysts said yesterday.
The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, selected eight tech companies in 2015 — including ecommerce group Alibaba’s Ant Financial and game developer Tencent — to develop pilot programs to give consumers credit scores.
The initiative was part of a government-backed effort to increase lending to hundreds of millions of Chinese who want access to small business loans or consumer credit but have no collateral or financial history. Beijing aimed to roll out a nationwide system by 2020.