ZestFinance receives funding from Baidu 

ZestFinance announced that it has received a strategic investment from Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU), the leading Chinese language Internet search provider. ZestFinance is a Los Angeles-based company that uses machine learning to transform vast amounts of complex data into credit scores. Artificial intelligence experts and data scientists at both companies plan to work together to apply ZestFinance’s underwriting technology to Baidu’s search, location, and payment data in order to improve credit scoring decisions in China.

“At ZestFinance, our mission is to make fair and transparent credit available to everyone,” said Douglas Merrill, Founder and CEO of ZestFinance. “This investment from Baidu will help further our mission, particularly in the fast-growing Chinese credit market. We’re thrilled to work with Baidu to turn search data into credit data.”

In emerging markets such as China, consumer credit data is generally unavailable as building consumer credit history is at a nascent stage. Baidu’s rich user search data will be valuable for loan underwriting and assessing credit risk. The ZestFinance platform is highly applicable to emerging markets because it accurately underwrites people who lack credit history.

“ZestFinance’s unique ability to analyze and process complex, disparate data to make accurate credit decisions is very valuable to the Chinese credit market, where a centralized credit scoring system has yet to emerge,” said Tony Yip, Global Head of Investment, Mergers and Acquisitions at Baidu. “ZestFinance will be an important technology partner for Baidu going forward, and we look forward to working together to help transform the financial services market in China.”

ZestFinance is one of the fastest growing financial technology startups in the United States and licenses its platform to companies across a variety of industries globally. The company’s technology runs dozens of mathematical models in parallel to make timely, accurate underwriting decisions, without human intervention.

Source: ZestFinance

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