It’s certainly weird to deliver a speech about how you operate in the gray area of regulations to facilitate risky loans and you’re proud of it and regulators are all wrong when said regulators are sitting in the audience...
> The outspoken billionaire railed against the Basel Accords, a series of international regulations that require banks to hold a certain amount of capital, as outmoded for the modern era. He also accused Chinese lending institutions of having a “pawnshop” mentality of using collateral instead of advanced credit ratings and watchdogs of not knowing the difference between regulation and supervision.
And on new regulations in draft stage to cover the current gray areas https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN27I1WB:
> While it made no mention of Ant, the draft comes as regulators sharpen their focus on banks that heavily use micro-lenders or third-party technology platforms like Ant for underwriting consumer loans, amid fears of rising defaults and deteriorating asset quality in a pandemic-hit economy.
I derived much of my understanding of Ant not from reporting, but rather, from talking to local sources who are more familiar with the matter. I’m on mobile now so won’t expand on this complex topic... However, if you know the Chinese language you can find plenty of criticisms of Ant’s personal credit/loan products (which, for instance, offer unsecured credit and loans to people with absolutely no income and/or collaterals, like college students, and coupled with aggressive marketing from online marketplaces including Alibaba’s Tmall, lead to hopeless debt cycles); probably less about risky business loans.
- Call you 100 times per day.
- Call you family and your friends and your colleague daily (via contact data collected by their apps)
- Threaten (but not actually do unless you owe them a lot) to sue you, in a way maximizing your stress.
- Visit your family in person and "politely" ask if they know you are in debt.
Google "花呗 催收" or "借呗 催收" then use Google Translate if you want to dig into this.
My dad had to receive money from someone who couldn't repeat their debts and there was an intermediate party that came to talk about everything and propose a plan.
Can’t comment on implementation details since thankfully neither my contacts nor I have experience with collections. (Btw, once upon a time, my Experian credit score dropped by like 150 points after a mysterious debt appeared on my credit report; turns out someone else’s debt was mistakenly put on my file. Luckily my name wasn’t also “mistakenly” sent to some collections agency. Definitely scared the shit out of me.)
This is just me speculating, but what if Jack realized the IPO would be a disaster (for that reason or others) and decided that this was the best strategy to halt it without recourse?