MYbank lent to street merchants from their QR-code payment trails

Traditional bank underwriting requires documentation — audited books, collateral, a credit history — that verifies a borrower's ability to repay without the bank having to watch the business operate directly. Street vendors, small shop owners and micro-merchants running cash-and-QR-code businesses have none of this: no formal accounting, nothing to pledge as collateral, and often no prior borrowing history at all, which is precisely why traditional banks treat them as unbankable regardless of how healthy their actual cash flow is.

MYbank, an online bank founded within Alibaba's Ant Financial ecosystem, built its '310' lending model around a different evidence source entirely: the transaction data already flowing through a merchant's payment QR code every time a customer paid them. Instead of asking for documents these merchants could never produce, MYbank read their actual cash-flow history directly from the payments infrastructure they already used daily.

Underwrote loans from QR-code payment trails already generated, replacing unproducible documents with hard-to-fake cash-flow data and removing human officers to cut cost.

QR-code payments create a continuous, hard-to-fake record of actual business activity.

Automated models assess creditworthiness without human loan officers, eliminating fixed labor costs.

Transaction data proved a reliable predictor of repayment, keeping default rates low.

The bank's access to payment data made the approach possible at scale.

When customers can't produce required documents, look for an existing data trail they generate daily that can substitute for the missing paperwork.

The automated model cut average per-loan operating cost from roughly ¥2,000 under manual underwriting to approximately ¥2.30, while serving more than 40 million small merchants cumulatively, with an average loan size of ¥36,000, average loan duration under 120 days, and over 80% of borrowers receiving their first-ever formal bank business loan; the bank has maintained a 30-day non-performing loan rate around 1–1.5%, comparable to or better than conventional small-business lending despite serving borrowers traditional banks had excluded entirely.