Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Changzhou Branch Implements Multiple Measures to Promote High-Quality Development of the "Chang Personal Loan" Business

Originally sourced from: Yangtze Evening News

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) Changzhou Branch launched the “Gongyin Changge Individual Loan” online financing business in September 2024, which has since been upgraded to Version 4.0. It has developed into a regional e-loan featured-scenario solution for secondary branches with the largest scale and the most customers. As of the end of February 2026, the loan balance of “Gongyin Changge Individual Loan” was 915 million yuan, up by 94 million yuan from the beginning of the year. The balance of non-performing loans was 5.12M yuan, with a non-performing loan ratio of 0.56%. This has provided strong support for incremental growth in inclusive-finance account holders at the Changzhou Branch, and has received favorable customer reputation and market feedback.

Innovation in “Gongyin Changge Individual Loan” adopts “Changge fen” as the basis for customer eligibility and credit-loan assessment. It quantifies traditional qualitative indicators, providing a powerful tool for building accurate profiles of individual business owners. This scoring model determines positive and negative indicators for credit evaluation of individual business owners, including a wide range of data points such as business registration, social insurance, housing provident fund, real estate, court-related information, special permits, and more. In the form of a credit score, it enables a “seconds-level” credit profile of individual business owners.

In the pre-loan stage, the model is used to set limiting conditions. Customers that do not meet eligibility requirements—such as those with abnormal business operations, dishonesty-executed persons, those involved in gambling, pornography, drugs, and violence, or those with credit breaches—are automatically blocked. During the loan stage, relying on the risk control system for the bank’s “Fast Loans for Business” at the head office, by introducing big data and artificial intelligence technologies, a comprehensive analysis is conducted on customers’ credit status. For risk-control rules that may increase default risk—such as triggering the number of financing institutions, total financing amount, historical default records, and the frequency of short-term credit applications—the system will reject disbursement to ensure the safety of loan funds. In the post-loan stage, on the one hand, the head office conducts off-site monitoring during the business’s existence period, monitoring abnormal changes in real-time data; after an early-warning is triggered, manual intervention is initiated. On the other hand, Changzhou Enterprise Credit Information Service Co., Ltd. regularly monitors changes in the risk level of existing customers. If risk warning information is provided, it is promptly sent to ICBC, and branch customer managers verify it a second time.

To maintain overall stability in asset quality, on one side, the “Changge Loan” risk-warning intelligent outbound-calling function has been launched and is in operation. The function relies on big data analytics and natural language processing technology, providing strong support for improving risk prevention and customer service efficiency for the “Changge Loan” business. On the other side, ICBC and the Qicheng Credit Information company continuously adjust the model parameters to reduce risk coefficients. For example, the eligibility threshold of “Changge fen” has been raised from the initial 480 points to 500 points; cases where the business operator changed within the past 3 months have been adjusted to only become eligible if the operator change occurred within nearly one year; and individual business owners newly registered for less than one year are not eligible for admission, and so forth. (Xiong Yao)

Proofreading: Wang Fei