China’s tech giants Tencent and Alibaba are refusing to co-operate with a government-backed credit scoring programme by withholding access to their troves of customer loans data, said the Financial Times.
The People’s Bank of China launched Baihang, a private credit scoring company, in March 2018 in order to create a national system that would cover the 460 million Chinese who have no formal credit histories but who may be relying on the country’s vast fintech sector for loans.
Despite operating for a year and a half and being the only company licensed in China to provide personal credit scores, Baihang’s coverage of users has been patchy. The lack of co-operation highlights the struggle between the government and China’s major tech companies over control of user data.