DBS Bank Taiwan (星展銀行) yesterday announced a collaboration with PChome Online Inc (網路家庭) to offer an online lending service exclusively for individual vendors operating on the e-commerce unit PChomestore Inc (商店街).
The service was launched after PChome chairman Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志) and DBS discussed how to help individual vendors secure funds for business expansion, DBS Taiwan’s executive director of cards and unsecured loans Calvin Lin (林群凱) said by telephone.
Many online shop owners face difficulty obtaining a loan online.
Photo courtesy of DBS Bank Taiwan
DBS hopes its new service would help online shop owners continue growing and seize more business opportunities, DBS general manager Lim Him-chuan (林鑫川) said in a statement.
Although many local banks have started online lending service to attract individual consumers and to boost their personal loan business, DBS’s service would be very different from them, as it features a five-minute application and utilization of an application programming interface (API), Lin said.
“Prospective borrowers would not need to submit any files or documents except for a photograph of their identity card for authentication, as we will directly obtain their data by employing our API solutions, which will need their approval first, of course,” he said.
The bank has developed a system to automatically analyze applicants’ credit profiles and credit risk based on data from PChome and the Joint Credit Information Center to decide how much it should grant and how high the interest rates should be, a process that would be completed within five minutes, he said.
Many factors would be considered in the analysis, including sales volumes that individual vendors generate on the e-commerce platform, how long they have been operating and other operational behaviors that help define credit risk, Lin said.
“It is the first time a bank has partnered with an e-commerce firm to provide such lending services in Taiwan,” he said.
Individual vendors do not have to be existing clients of DBS before applying for the loans, he said.
“Our service is expected to create a win-win situation, in which we can gain new clients, store owners can have sufficient funds for business expansions and PChome benefits from more shop partners on its platform,” Lin said.
The bank allows borrowers to repay loans at any time to provide more fund management flexibility, while the interest rates — depending on the borrower’s credit rating — would be as low as 2.68 percent, lower than rates that banks set for personal loans, he said.
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