LexinFintech Holdings Ltd. (“Lexin”) (NASDAQ: LX), a leading online consumption and consumer finance platform for educated young professionals in China, has been awarded the Best AI and Innovation Lab Award in China by The Asian Banker, whose awards are seen as an undisputed benchmark measuring the performance of the best banks and fintech companies in Asia.
“Lexin’s AI Lab significantly enhanced the company’s operating efficiency and increased its profitability by providing automated artificial intelligence services throughout every step of its transaction processes. Both of its research and development (R&D) expense and R&D personnel as a percentage of total employee headcount have been maintained at levels that lead the industry,” The Asian Banker commented.
Lexin’s R&D expenses in 2019 reached RMB416 million, a 30% increase as compared to a year earlier and accounted for 18% of the company’s total operating expenses, representing one of the highest percentages in the industry. One out of three employees at Lexin works for the company’s R&D and risk management teams.
Lexin’s continued commitment to technological innovations has notably enhanced the company’s technological competitiveness. Lexin’s AI operation system, “Lingxi,” can solve 97% of its customer enquiries without the need for any manual intervention, significantly improving its user experience the efficiency of customer service.
Lexin’s proprietary risk management system, “Hawkeye,” can automatically process 99.8% of new customers’ loan applications with more than 4,700 decision rules and over 15,900 data variables, making it possible for Lexin’s customers to complete a credit application on the company’s APP within minutes, and avoiding the need to submit significant amounts of paperwork.
Lexin’s fund matching system, “Wormhole,” can then match the approved loan requests with more than 100 institutional funding partners in real time with a success rate of 95%, allowing the company to handle nearly a million transactions a day.
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AI innovations and advancements have enabled accelerated growth for Lexin’s consumption ecosystem, which includes installment e-commerce platform Fenqile, membership consumption platform Le Card, and Lehua Card, a product enabling Lexin’s customers to use their credit lines in numerous online and offline consumption scenarios.
Lexin also provides financial institutions with fintech services and retail merchants with consumer finance tools and customer management services. With these tools and services, the company combines consumer finance, membership services, and fintech services into a single ecosystem.
As part of its loan facilitation business, Lexin’s revenue from profit sharing credit business, which does not require the company to take on any financial risk and has no leverage limit thus allowing a fintech platform to fully unleash its loan originations capacity, surged by 171% to $394 million and is expected to account for 50% of the company’s business volume by the end of the year.
This is the second time Lexin has won an Asian Banker Award. The company was also awarded the Best Lending Technology Initiative, Application or Program in China in 2019.
The Asian Banker awards are generally viewed by executives as one of the most rigorous, prestigious and transparent financial awards in Asia. Lexin was one of nearly 400 applicants that The Asian Banker’s research team spent over 3 months reviewing and investigating before making the final decision. Previous winners of the award include world-renowned financial institutions such as Citigroup, Ant Financial and ICBC.
