Aliloan finds partner for new virtual credit card biz

Aliloan, the financial arm of Internet firm Alibaba Group, has decided to cooperate with Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank (SRCB) to launch its "payment by credit" service, China Business News reported over the weekend.

The credit payment service, named the "virtual credit card", will be available within the month and the initial credit grantor will be SRCB, with the bank expected to grant around 100 million yuan ($16.2 million) for the service, the report said Saturday, citing several unnamed sources.

Aliloan is in talk with several other banks for the new service and over 1 million Taobao C2C sellers and around 30,000 Tmall B2C sellers have already opened such services.

Aliloan and SRCB refused to comment when reached by the Global Times Sunday.

On March 6, the firm announced that Aliloan would provide credit payment service first in Zhejiang Province where Alibaba is headquartered and Hunan Province by as early as the middle of April.

However, the service will only be available on mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets, rather than on computers, the company said.

Based on data from Taobao and Tmall buyers such as age and purchasing habits, Aliloan will assess their credit and grant them from 1 to 5,000 yuan in credit with as long as 38 interest-free days. The partner banks of Aliloan will pay for sellers and cooperated merchants pay 1 percent of buyers' expenses as service fees to Aliloan, according to Hu Xiaoming, head of Aliloan.