Haisheng Wu
Analyst · Morgan Stanley
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. In the first half of 2025, the global economic landscape faced growing uncertainty amid rising geopolitical tensions. Despite external headwinds, China's economy remained broadly stable and demonstrated strong resilience. The consumer credit industry, which serves as a key driver of boosting consumption, is undergoing a wave of supply- side reforms under regulatory guidance. The goal of these reforms is to provide inclusive and innovative consumer credit solutions across a variety of consumption scenarios to better address diverse user needs. With a user-centric approach and a focus on the essence of fintech, we are actively leveraging AI to drive upgrades across the consumer credit value chain, reinforcing our leadership in the industry. By the end of the second quarter, our AI-powered credit decision engine and asset distribution platform empowered a total of 165 financial institutions and served more than 60 million users with approved credit lines on a cumulative basis. Total loan facilitation and origination volume on our platform increased by approximately 16% year-over-year to RMB 84.6 billion. With operational efficiency continuing to improve, our take rate for the quarter reached 5.4%, up almost 1 percentage point year-over-year. Non-GAAP net income increased by 30.8% year-over-year to RMB 1.85 billion, while non-GAAP EPADS on a fully diluted basis rose by 48.8% to RMB 13.63. Despite macroeconomic and regulatory headwinds, we maintained strategic discipline and prioritized high-quality growth to achieve solid operating results. Given the relatively challenging market environment during the quarter, we continued to refine our risk strategies and models to improve key performance metrics. In April, we slightly tightened our risk standards in response to uncertainty related to potential tariff impacts. As the regulatory developments created additional uncertainty, we further optimized our risk control and asset distribution strategies in June, maintaining our acceptance rate at a reasonable level while improving risk metrics. As a result, the leading risk indicated FPD, or First Payment Default, over 7 days for new loans facilitated in June decreased by about 5% when compared to that in May, while our C2M2 metric, which measures delinquency rates after 30-day collection, remained stable. We also made further upgrades to our risk decisioning AI agent by leveraging large language models or LLM technology during the quarter. By integrating 670 models, 7,129 strategy modules and over 100 million historical decisions into the foundation model, we are establishing an end-to-end risk management solution that is moving us steadily toward more intelligent decision- making. Our user profile enhancement AI agent uses LLM capabilities to activate knowledge association and identify underlying logic behind the data, enriching user profiles for over 20% of our core user base. It refines and cross validates key labels such as industry, income and occupation, which in turn, optimizes our credit offers. Meanwhile, our intelligent algorithm agent runs around the clock to train and fine-tune our models and automatically generates core risk model chains. Two of our core behavior scorecard models or B scorecard models improved KS scores, a metric that measures how effectively a model separates risk levels, by 89 and 93 basis points, respectively. In Q2, overall liquidity in the financial system remained ample, though we observed some structural differences across asset classes. Despite an uncertain regulatory outlook for the industry, we leveraged our diversified funding partnerships and robust asset quality to maintain a relatively stable funding supply throughout the quarter. As a leading fintech platform, we continue to demonstrate strength in the ABS market, issuing approximately RMB 7.8 billion during the quarter, representing a year-over-year increase of about 70%. As a result, total ABS issuance in the first half of the year nearly matched the full year total in 2024 with issuance costs declining further to a record low. As the proportion of ABS in our capital heavy funding increased further, our overall funding costs decreased by an additional 10 basis points sequentially. On the user acquisition front, we continue to implement a user-centric strategy, making our offerings available to users wherever they are. Through embedded finance, we have significantly deepened our presence across a diverse range of Internet scenarios, including short-form videos, e-commerce, mobility, food delivery and financial services. This enables us to offer users a convenient and seamless borrowing experience while also expanding our brand visibility and market reach. In Q2, we further extended the network of our embedded finance business by adding 4 new strategic channels, bringing us close to full coverage across all leading Internet platforms. During the quarter, total new credit line users grew 40% year-over-year to CNY 1.79 million, while average cost per credit line user decreased slightly sequentially. The number of new borrowers increased by approximately 60% year-over-year to 1.23 million. New credit line users from the embedded finance channels increased by 103% year-over-year, while loan volumes surged by roughly 155%. ROA of this segment remained stable throughout the quarter. In Q2, loan volumes supported by our total technology solutions business increased approximately 150% year-over-year. We continue to advance our AI+ bank strategy, which focuses on designing and developing AI-powered products tailored for financial institutions. As part of this effort, we are upgrading our FocusPRO credit tech solution into a next-generation super AI credit agent to strengthen our B2B services capabilities. We also entered into a strategic partnership with an AI hardware provider to develop a customized all- in-one AI machine that will further enhance the overall competitiveness of our AI products. These offerings will cover core functions such as user acquisition, risk management and day-to-day operations. For example, we are building an AI agent to empower key credit approval processes by combining multimodal LLM capabilities with our extensive experience serving financial institutions. Once widely adopted, this agent is expected to help address the shortage of risk personnel in lower-tier cities and significantly improve the efficiency of credit approvals. With development partially complete, our AI agent products are already attracting strong interest from banks, securing several commercial orders scheduled for launch in Q3. In April, China's National Financial Regulatory Administration issued a notice on strengthening the management of the Internet loan facilitation business of commercial banks to enhance the quality and efficiency of financial services, providing clearer guidance for Internet-based lending practices. We believe the new regulatory guidelines will help further improve the overall health and sustainability of the loan facilitation sector, making consumer finance more accessible and delivering greater value to users. In the near term, the industry will go through an adjustment period to align with these new regulatory requirements. Our prudent operations and strong execution capabilities have enabled us to successfully navigate similar adjustments in the past with resilience and solid results. As a leading platform in the industry, we believe we are well positioned to thrive in a healthier and more favorable market environment over the long run and further consolidate our leadership position. Looking ahead to the second half of 2025, we will continue to prioritize prudent, compliant operations and optimize products and services to better address user needs while improving overall operational efficiency. We will continue advancing our One Core, Two Wings strategy, executing on our AI+ credit strategy and enhancing our AI agent platform to drive the digital transformation of financial institutions. Additionally, we are pleased to report encouraging progress in our overseas expansion. This quarter, we took a baby step with the launch of small-scale operations in the U.K., which though still at an early stage, is delivering a healthy performance across key metrics. We will continue to refine our risk models and enhance conversion efficiency. We believe the robust fintech infrastructure this market offers presents significant opportunities for us and are confident that our AI and big data capabilities will create substantial value by addressing underserved local demand. Meanwhile, we are proactively exploring additional international opportunities, and our commitment to global expansion has never been stronger. With that, I will now turn the call over to Alex.