Alibaba Facilitates SMEs With The Help Of Financial Institutions

Alibaba is tying up with credit agencies and banks to provide a credit facility to SMEs.

Alibaba announced yesterday that it has tied up with over 25 credit agencies and banks across the globe to offer a newly introduced credit facility to small medium enterprises. The move came as the online trading giant has continued to ramp up its B2B ecosystem across the world by working with offline industries.

The Hangzhou based enterprise is an electronic platform that has grown from a directory of Chinese vendors to a single stop platform offering various services for international buyers and suppliers, including business and logistics verification facilities.

“To Alibaba, regardless of B2B exports or imports, the ecosystem is very important. The Alibaba mission is to make it easy to do any type of business,” CEO Daniel Zhang said while addressing a conference on Tuesday in Hangzhou, a city of Zhejiang province. The organization has its head office in this Eastern Chinese city, which is also Jack Ma’s birthplace.

Chinese partners of electronic commerce company’s latest move to finance SMEs include China Merchants Bank, Bank of China, and Alibaba-backed online bank ‘MYBANK’. At the current moment, only Chinese SMEs have been able to borrow loans from the online retailer to finance trading done across the borders.

The ecommerce enterprise is also aiming to introduce its own ranking system (credit.alibaba.com) later in 2016. It stated it would rank Chinese vendors who have joined the platform. The determination of the credit rankings is done after analyzing E-commerce company’s ratings, public records, and big data from conventional credit scoring organizations.

“By building up the credit profiles of Chinese SMEs based on business-related data, Alibaba.com’s credit reporting service can help overseas buyers identify trustworthy trading partners and provide Chinese suppliers access to innovative financing options,” told Sophie Wu from company’s B2B business unit.

Over the past 12 months, the company has succeeded in implementing many initiatives for the creation of a stronger ecosystem. In July, the implementation of a trade assurance program was done to provide consumers coverage on their procurements on Alibaba. If a purchaser gets low quality goods or receives order later, they are entitled to be repaid in full.

The organization also cooperates with various shipping businesses to offer logistics solutions to purchasers who use Alibaba marketplace. In December, it signed an agreement with the media company UBM, where both the businesses would be combining their offline and online competencies for developing an electronic platform for helping suppliers and purchasers at trade shows.

Interested parties could look for prospective collaborators and reach them before a trade show. In other news, the company's travel unit looked to pull partners from American travel service providers, destinations, and tour operators to benefit from the increase in the travel of Chinese people to the United States.