Ah, young love. Their public offerings barely past, China’s Alibaba and US peer-to-peer finance pioneer Lending Club have hooked up. Lending Club will offer working capital financing to US businesses that buy from Chinese suppliers on Alibaba.com, an English language business-to-business website. The companies promise that an application takes less than five minutes, and offer up to $300,000 in funding. Monthly lending rates range from 0.5 per cent to 2.4 per cent (6 per cent to 32 per cent annually).
啊，年轻人的爱情。中国阿里巴巴(Alibaba)和美国P2P金融先驱Lending Club刚刚忙完了各自的首次公开发行(IPO)，就走到了一起。Lending Club将向从Alibaba.com上的中国供应商那里购买产品的美国企业提供流动资金融资。这家网站是阿里巴巴旗下的英文B2B网站。这两家公司承诺，贷款申请流程只需不到5分钟，贷款金额最高可达30万美元，月息为0.5%至2.4%（相当于年息6%至32%）。
It is a canny pairing. Alibaba contributes the borrowers, providing insights into their creditworthiness from online transaction history, and visibility on the usage of the funds. It should benefit from added sales on Alibaba.com, which is one of its smallest online marketplaces (others include Taobao, a Chinese language consumer-to-consumer site, and Tmall, a business-to-consumer site). Lending Club, meanwhile, gets access to a pool of borrowers. Consistent with Lending Club’s model, the loans will be packaged and passed on to individual and institutional investors in the US.
这是一个精明的配对。阿里巴巴贡献借款人，依据在线交易记录提供关于他们信用状况的信息，并提供关于资金使用情况的信息。这一合作应该能够受益于Alibaba.com平台销售额的增长。Alibaba.com是阿里巴巴旗下规模最小的在线市场之一（该公司旗下的在线市场还包括中文C2C网站淘宝网(Taobao)，以及B2C网站天猫(Tmall)）。Lending Club则得到了与大量借款人建立联系的机会。它发放的贷款将被打包，然后出售给美国的个人投资者和机构投资者，这与Lending Club的现有业务模式一致。
This is just Alibaba’s latest step into finance. Through affiliate Ant Financial it already operates China’s largest money market fund, with assets of more than $80bn. Last month, Ant Financial became the first of eight companies granted a licence to launch a credit-scoring service, Sesame Credit. It will benefit from access to data on Alibaba’s 300m consumers and 37m small business users — including visibility on merchants’ cash flows. In a market with short credit histories, and outmoded and disconnected data collection processes, the new business could change consumer finance.
这只是阿里巴巴进军金融领域的最新动作。在此之前，它已然通过关联企业蚂蚁金服(Ant Financial)经营着中国最大的货币市场基金，管理资产规模超过800亿美元。上月，蚂蚁金服成为中国8家获发个人征信牌照的民营机构中首家推出个人征信服务——名为“芝麻信用”(Sesame Credit)——的机构。芝麻信用的优势是，它可访问阿里巴巴拥有的3亿消费者和3700万小企业用户的数据，包括关于商家现金流的信息。在一个信用历史不长、数据收集流程过时且不畅通的市场上，芝麻信用可能会改变消费金融的面貌。
Although the new Lending Club partnership is initially limited to the US, it may well expand globally alongside Alibaba’s ecommerce business. Alibaba’s finance businesses are becoming an important part of its investment case. Young love can deepen into something greater.
尽管阿里巴巴与Lending Club新建立的合作最初只限于美国，但很可能会随阿里巴巴的电商业务一道扩展到世界各地。阿里巴巴的金融业务正成为其投资吸引力的重要组成部分。年轻人的爱情也可以发展为一种更持久的关系。
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