When Ant Financial launched its credit scoring system, Sesame Credit, in January 2015, it said the data-driven product would “make credit more available to millions of consumers across China”, giving individuals access to everything from mortgages to mobile phone contracts to car loans.
But nearly four years later, Ant Financial, which is an affiliate of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, has never used Sesame Credit for lending decisions, and critics are increasingly questioning whether the tool can be used to accurately assess individual behaviour.
Sesame, which is an opt-in feature of the Alipay mobile payments app, draws upon the biggest pool of non-traditional ratings data in the world. It synthesises details from hundreds of sources — ranging from purchases on Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace to subway fares — into a single trustworthiness number for each user, called a “Sesame score”.