This study identifies an incentive-compatible mechanism to foster individual environmental engagement. Utilizing a dataset comprising 100,000 randomly selected users of Ant Forest—a prominent personal carbon accounting platform embedded within Alipay, China's leading BigTech super-app—we provide causal evidence that individuals strategically engage in eco-friendly behaviors to enhance their credit limits, particularly when approaching borrowing constraints. These behaviors not only illustrate the green nudging effect of BigTech but also generate value for the platform by leveraging individual green actions as soft information, thereby improving the efficiency of credit allocation. Using a structural model, we estimate an annual green value of 427.52 million US dollars generated by linking personal carbon accounting with BigTech credit. We also show that the incentive-based mechanism surpasses green mandates and subsidies in improving consumer welfare and overall societal welfare. Our findings highlight the role of an incentive-aligned approach, such as integrating personal carbon accounts into credit reporting frameworks, in addressing environmental challenges.

A lack of sufficient information about potential borrowers is a major obstacle to access to financing from the traditional financial sector. In response to the need for better information to prevent fraud, to increase access to finance and to support balanced sustainable development, countries around the world have moved over the past several decades to develop credit information reporting requirements and systems to improve the coverage and quality of credit information. Until recently, such requirements mainly covered only banks. However, with the process of digital transformation in China and around the world, a range of new credit providers have emerged, in the context of financial technology (FinTech, TechFin and BigTech). Application of advanced data and analytics technologies provides major opportunities for both market participants – both traditional and otherwise – as well as for credit information agencies: by utilizing advanced technologies, participants and credit reporting agencies can collect massive amounts of information from various online and other activities (‘Big Data’), which contributes to the analysis of borrowing behavior and improves the accuracy of creditworthiness assessments, thereby enhancing availability of finance and supporting growth and development while also moderating prudential, behavioral and conduct related concerns at the heart of financial regulation. Reflecting international experience, China has over the past three decades developed a regulatory regime for credit information reporting and business. However, even in the context of traditional banking and credit, it has not come without problems. With the rapid growth and development of FinTech, TechFin and BigTech lenders, however, have come both real opportunities to leverage credit information and data but also real challenges around its regulation. For example, due to fragmented sources of borrower information and the involvement of many players of different types, there are difficulties in clarifying the business scope of credit reporting and also serious problems in relation to customer protection. Moreover, inadequate incentives for credit information and data sharing pose a challenge for regulators to promote competition and innovation in the credit market. Drawing upon the experiences of other jurisdictions, including the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Singapore and Hong Kong, this paper argues that China should establish a sophisticated licensing regime and setout differentiated requirements for credit reporting agencies in line with the scope and nature of their business, thus addressing potential for regulatory arbitrage. Further, there is a need to formulate specific rules governing the provision of customer information to credit reporting agencies and the resolution of disputes arising from the accuracy and completeness of credit data. An effective information and data sharing scheme should be in place to help lenders make appropriate credit decisions and facilitate access to finance where necessary. The lessons from China’s experience in turn hold key lessons for other jurisdictions as they move from credit information to credit data regulation in their own financial systems.

This paper evaluates the impact of mobile cashless payment on credit provision to the underprivileged. Using a representative sample of Alipay users that contained detailed information about their activities in consumption, credit, investment, and digital footprints, I exploit a natural experiment to identify the real effects of cashless payment adoption. In this natural experiment, the staggered placement of Alipay-bundled shared bikes across different Chinese cities brings exogenous variations to the payment flow, allowing me to address the endogeneity issues and establish a causal relationship. I find that the use of in-person payment in a month increases the likelihood of getting access to credit in the same month by 56.3%. Conditional on having credit access, a 1% increase in the in-person payment flow leads to a 0.41% increase in the credit line. Those having higher in-person payment flow also use their credit lines more. Importantly, the positive effect of in-person payment flow on credit provision mainly exists for the less educated and the older, suggesting that cashless payment particularly benefits those who are traditionally underserved.

Over the past 150 years, finance has evolved into one of the world’s most globalized, digitized and regulated industries. Digitalization has transformed finance but also enabled new entrants over the past decade in the form of technology companies, especially FinTechs and BigTechs. As a highly digitized industry, incumbents and new entrants are increasingly pursuing similar approaches and models, focusing on the economies of scope and scale typical of finance and the network effects typical of data, with the predictable result of the emergence of increasingly large digital finance platforms. We argue that the combination of digitization, new entrants (especially BigTechs) and platformization of finance – which we describe as FinTech 4.0 and mark as beginning in 2019-2020 – brings massive benefits and an increasing range of risks to broader sustainable development. The platformization of finance poses challenges for societies and regulators around the world, apparent most clearly to date in the US and China. Existing regulatory frameworks for finance, competition, data, and technology are not designed to comprehensively address the challenges to these trends to broader sustainable development. We need to build new approaches domestically and internationally to maximize the benefits of network effects and economies of scope and scale in digital finance while monitoring and controlling the attendant risks of platformization of finance across the existing regulatory silos. We argue for a principles-based approach that brings together regulators responsible for different sectors and functions, regulating both on a functional activities based approach but also – as scale and interconnectedness increase – addressing specific entities as they emerge: a graduated proportional hybrid approach, appropriate both domestically in the US, China and elsewhere, as well as for cross-border groups, building on experiences of supervisory colleges and lead supervision developed for Globally Systemically Important Financial Institutions (G-SIFIs) and Financial Market Infrastructures (FMIs). This will need to be combined with an appropriate strategic approach to data in finance, to enable the maximization of data benefits while constraining related risks.