A view of the PBC's headquarters in Beijing Photo: cnsphoto

China on Sunday began to provide public and financial institutions with second-generation credit report inquiry services, a move that analysts said will provide a more comprehensive credit picture for individuals amid the country's strengthened efforts to forge its social credit system.

On Friday, the Credit Reference Center (CRC) under the People's Bank of China (PBC), China's central bank, brought the second-generation personal credit inquiry system online.

The second-generation credit system offers some additional information compared with the first generation, including revolving loans, large credit card installment payments, joint borrowers and repayment records over the past five years, according to the PBC. 

The second-generation credit reporting system comes as the nation's financial market, supported by advanced technology, is undergoing tremendous changes as online payment prevail and lending sources become more diversified. This situation calls for the upgrading of the system to provide more accurate and authentic credit records for the public, said Dong Dengxin, director of the Finance and Securities Institute at Wuhan University of Science and Technology.

The second-generation system will provide a clearer credit image of Chinese individuals, as the new system aims to enhance the quality and expand the coverage of social credit information, Dong told the Global Times on Sunday.

Utility fees are not part of the new generation system, as some had speculated might be the case, but the credit report format provide space to include such information, said an official of the CRC, whose name was not disclosed. 

Dong said that utility fees are expected to be included, as they can effectively reflect Chinese residents' credit records, but they "need to be based on some interval value from big-data calculations."

The boundary for data collection should be clarified by the authorities - what kind of information must be collected, Wu Hao, an industry analyst based in Shenzhen, told the Global Times on Sunday

"It would be a great violation into the personal privacy of Chinese people if their information is collected in a casual manner," he said.

The CRC will hold discussions with organizations that offer data sources. It will be strictly required under relevant rules that the collection of personal information shall be subject to the consent of the subject and shall not be collected without his consent. The center will strengthen efforts to ensure data safety first and then include the data in the system for open inquiry, said the center.

The first-generation credit reporting system was established in 2006. The PBC opened the business to private companies in 2015.

The upgrading of the credit system will have a wide influence on the Chinese people and domestic companies. As of the end of 2019, China's credit reference system had collected the information of 1.02 billion individuals and more than 28 million companies and other organizations - one of the largest such databases in the world, according to the central bank.

In 2019, the number of personal credit inquiries the CRC received was 2.4 billion, while the number of enterprise credit inquiries it received reached 110 million, the PBC said.


Newspaper headline: New generation of credit data comes