New urbanites to enjoy streamlined financing

China is endeavoring to make financial services more accessible and convenient for new urbanites through a variety of measures, including data sharing, targeted support and financial innovation, regulatory officials said on Monday.

The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission defined new urban residents as people who live in a city permanently but have not yet obtained a local hukou, or those who obtained a local hukou within the past three years.

A hukou is an official document certifying that the holder is a legal resident of a particular area.

There are more than 300 million such new urban residents in the country. They have rigid demand for jobs, starting up businesses, renting or buying homes, child education, childcare and eldercare, according to the regulator.

Wang Wei, deputy director of the CBIRC's Beijing office, said the office has been promoting the sharing of government and regulatory data to effectively mitigate the problem of inadequate financial services due to information asymmetry.

Beijing's comprehensive financial services network has so far integrated information about new urban residents in multiple categories, including eligibility and participation in the housing provident fund, social security and medical insurance. Currently, 42 banking and insurance institutions have applied to gain access to the network, which will help the institutions stay abreast of dynamic credit conditions of new urban residents and control financial risks with greater efficiency, Wang said.

"We will further break down data barriers and use data to create accurate customer profiles of new urban residents under the premise of protecting personal information according to the law, so as to increase breadth and depth of financial services for this group of people," he added.

The Beijing office has also allowed new urban residents in the capital to enjoy the same policies as those who hold a local hukou in terms of government subsidies and fee waivers when they apply for entrepreneurship-related loans.

As of the end of February, the balance of such loans within the jurisdiction of the Beijing office reached 1.18 billion yuan ($185.3 million), which was 12.8 times the amount from a year earlier.

As a province attracting a huge number of migrant workers, Guangdong saw the population of its new urban residents top 40 million by the end of 2021. To better assist migrant workers to settle down in the province, the CBIRC's Guangdong office guided banking and insurance institutions to actively participate in the subsidized rental housing pilot program, said Wang Wuqing, deputy director of the office.

The Guangdong branch of China Construction Bank Corp, a large State-owned commercial lender, has so far supported 245 subsidized rental housing projects, issued over 16 billion yuan worth of loans and helped supply 165,300 units of rental homes to the market, Wang said.

Similarly, under the guidance of the CBIRC's Chongqing office, two banks signed strategic cooperation agreements for subsidized rental housing with the Chongqing Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and issued about 2.5 billion yuan in loans to 27 projects.