Personal Credit is to be kicked off in China

On July 1, Shanghai will for the fist time kick off the experimental work on personal credit in China. As a result, over one million city residents of Shanghai will become the first group of the Chinese, holding personal credit record. This marks the beginning of China's personal credit system after a long time of preparation.

Personal credit system has 150 years of history in the world. In developed countries with complete and mature financial system, enterprise and banks can check about the credit status of a citizen from intermediary institutions by way of payment inquiry to decide whether or not to engage in any economic relationship with him or her.

In China, such a system has for a long time remained unavailable. Due to the lack of information on personal credit situation, banks have a lot of idle fund but fear to grant loans to individuals, and the procedure of applying for personal credit is over-elaborated and complicated. Few firms accept personal checks despite the launching of personal check business, the phenomenon of malicious overdraft on credit card being serious. All these problems indicate that establishing a personal credit system is badly needed.

Founded in July of 1999, Shanghai Credit Co. Ltd. (SCC) is jointly invested by Shanghai Information Center, Shanghai Trust Co. and the intermediary institution specially conducting unified personal credit investigation, the first in the history of the People's Republic of China.

Shanghai's 15 commercial banks have become the members of Shanghai Personal Credit Information Data Center Council (the supervisory organ administrating the work of Shanghai personal credit unified investigation). The first group of city residents holding personal credit record is those who have already had credit relations with these banks and those who have applied for getting overdrawable credit cards. The amounts of these two types of people are 680 thousand and 1.18 million respectively, the total clients exceeding 1.8 million.

Every commercial bank collects the credit status records of clients and input them into the database of Shanghai Credit Co., including the items and values of personal loans, overdraft information of credit cards, malicious overdrawing record and defraud banking record. From July 1, commercial banks can dial up and get through to SCC' database after receiving the personal loan application and can get the credit information of the applicant within 5 seconds so as to base their decision of whether or not to accept the application for it.

Shanghai's banking circle welcomes personal credit unified investigation. China Industry and Commerce Bank Shanghai Branch stated that they are designing a pure personal credit loan variety, which does not require any mortgage.



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