Last Wednesday, the "Special Plan for Asset Support of CICC-Meituan Business Loan Phase X" was approved to issue 5 billion yuan of stock shelves in Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and the establishment of the first special plan of 511 million yuan was completed on the same day. It is reported that this ABS financing relies on the business loan business section of Meituan's comment platform, with the operating loans of small and micro businesses issued by Meituan Small Loan as the basic assets, and the raised funds are used to provide low-cost loan funds for small and micro businesses and provide inclusive finance services for small and micro enterprises.

the author believes that for the traditional financial sector, there are congenital deficiencies or defects in solving the financing difficulties of small and micro enterprises, such as high cost and difficulty in risk identification. If we still follow the traditional thinking to solve the financing difficulties of small and micro enterprises, I am afraid it will be difficult to make a big breakthrough. Similar to ABS financing (securitization financing method supported by the assets of the project), relying on financial technology, providing low-cost inclusive finance services for small and micro enterprises in the platform ecology can effectively identify and avoid risks and reduce the identification cost, which may be one of the new ways to solve the financing difficulties of small and micro enterprises at present. Under the background of vigorously advocating to solve the financing difficulties of private enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises, this move by the regulatory authorities is a valuable exploration.

it is a worldwide problem that financing for small and micro enterprises is difficult and expensive. The problem that financing is difficult and expensive for small and micro enterprises in China has a long history, and the voices of all sectors of society have been very high. Although the relevant departments have issued many documents requiring financial institutions, including banks, to actively lend to small and medium-sized enterprises, financial institutions, as self-financing independent individuals, are always lacking in enthusiasm because of the small scale of small and medium-sized enterprises, low credit rating, few mortgaged properties or other assets, and no guarantee from large-scale groups with good credit.

from the perspective of financial institutions, the existence of the above problems means that lending to small and micro enterprises will make financial institutions face huge risks, and if they want to investigate the operating conditions of small and micro enterprises in detail, financial institutions will have to pay huge costs. To ensure a certain profit rate, you have to raise the loan interest rate. Moreover, if the cost of borrowing from banks is too high, small and micro enterprises will turn to other financing channels, and the efforts made by financial institutions to obtain information will be in vain.

this is the root of the problem-there is a serious information asymmetry between financial institutions and small and micro enterprises. Why is this problem always difficult to solve? The deep reason lies in the constraint of technical conditions, which makes it impossible for financial institutions to take effective measures to solve the information asymmetry problem with small and micro enterprises at a lower cost. Fortunately, the emergence of technologies such as big data, blockchain and artificial intelligence at this stage provides an excellent opportunity to solve the financing difficulties of small and micro enterprises. Because, after the integration of technology and financial industry, it has become a financial technology, and it is presented by the Internet, which has obvious characteristics such as openness, transparency, instant enjoyment, etc. Big data greatly reduces the information asymmetry, thus reducing the cost of information collection and exchange, customer transaction costs, resource allocation costs, labor costs, etc., so the service boundary of financial enterprises has expanded, that is, the service objects and scope of financial enterprises have also expanded. From the capital supply side, "1 yuan can manage money" appeared. From the demand side, the cost and risk problems existing in the capital demand of small and micro enterprises can be solved to a great extent.

In recent years, financial technology companies such as Ant Financial and Tencent Finance, including Meituan Finance, are actively deploying inclusive finance. Ant Financial and Tencent Finance have massive data support from the platforms of their respective groups, and Meituan Finance also has data support accumulated by the four LBS scenarios of arrival, arrival, travel and travel provided by Meituan Review. These financial technology companies that have mastered technologies such as big data and cloud computing have unique advantages in developing small and micro enterprise loans. Compared with traditional financial institutions, the cost of data and information collection is greatly reduced, but the efficiency is higher. With the financial business blessed by science and technology, the ability to identify credit risk and fraud risk, improve operational efficiency and reduce operating costs and supervision has been greatly improved.

Different from Ant Financial and Tencent Finance, Meituan has been deeply involved in the catering industry for many years. The financing needs of catering operators are simple and urgent: they need to solve the short-term capital turnover, obtain the favorite shop location, increase investment in a timely manner, and renovate, almost every item is a large investment. Over the years, Meituan has accumulated huge industry data. With the help of the self-developed forecasting model, Meituan's business loans can give more accurate portraits to users and quickly judge the business conditions of businesses in multiple dimensions. Meituan combines the capabilities of scenario, marketing, logistics, supply chain and management with the capabilities of financial institutions such as capital and risk control, and builds an ecological circle of "scenario+finance", thus relying on scenario products to transport capital blood to the capillaries of the real economy and help the healthy development of the real economy.

Yi Gang, governor of the central bank, once said that the central bank is working with relevant departments to make a comprehensive policy, focusing on three main financing channels, namely, setting up bond financing support tools for private enterprises, comprehensively using monetary and credit policy tools to guide financial institutions to increase credit for private enterprises, and studying the establishment of equity financing support tools for private enterprises, so as to support private enterprises to broaden financing channels and help private enterprises tide over difficulties. It can be expected that once these three measures are effectively implemented, it will greatly alleviate the financing difficulties and high financing costs of small and micro enterprises. However, these policies have a global perspective, and when they are actually implemented, they will inevitably encounter problems such as disharmony. When it comes to financial institutions, it is still difficult to overcome the information asymmetry contradiction between them and small and micro enterprises. Therefore, the best gesture to solve the financing difficulties of small and micro enterprises may be left-handed policy and right-handed technology, and the comprehensive effect of close cooperation between macro-policy and micro-financial technology is worth looking forward to.

(article source: shanghai securities news)