"People were telling us that you can't do this, that there isn't enough information on the Chinese internet," Li said.

The profiles have been robust enough for Wecash to form a partnership with the consumer finance arm of the Bank of Beijing, as well as with four peer-to-peer lending platforms, while also maintaining a default rate of about 2 per cent for the customers borrowing from those sources, he says.

The model is not unique. In fact, Wecash is on the crest of a wave of global innovation that is seeking to give more people and small companies access to credit, whether the loans come from banks or the rapidly growing non-bank industry known as alternative lending, which includes peer-to-peer platforms.

In the West, Spanish-based Traity is marketing verified online profiles that the company hopes can be used anywhere from an online bank to an Airbnb rental. OnDeck Capital, a platform in the United States that has lent out more than US$1.7 billion since 2007, just announced plans for a public offering in New York, where it could reportedly seek to raise up to US$1.5 billion.

In Manila, Lenddo appraises applicants' social media connections to derive credit scores, then lends its own capital to the qualifiers. In China, thousands of peer-to-peer lending platforms, many with unique credit and risk evaluation technologies, had an industrywide loan balance of 58 billion yuan (HK$73.4 billion) in June, against 31 billion yuan in January, according to data from Credit Suisse.

The trend presents a strong case for how non-financial businesses can use technology to include groups of people that have not traditionally been included in the banking sector.

The question now posed to banks worldwide is whether they plan to adapt to a legion of non-bank competitors in a rapidly shifting and increasingly risky market for credit.

"Some people say traditional banking is dead. That seems exaggerated, but a lot of innovation is taking place outside of the banks and the banks are trying to catch up," said Ivan Mortimer Schutts, a banking and payments expert at the World Bank. "Some banks are fighting back and there are companies that see that they can help the banks."

Wecash will work with whoever can provide customers with the cheapest sources of credit. Banks, peer-to-peer platforms and other alternative lenders all qualify as long as they keep costs low, Li says.

Thomas DeLuca, the chief executive of Advanced Merchant Payments (AMP) in Hong Kong, says the future of alternative lending technologies will eventually return to the banks themselves.

Risk assessment for small businesses is labour-intensive and small in scale, characteristics that have traditionally turned banks away from unsecured lending to small and medium-sized enterprises, DeLuca says.

AMP uses bank account details, such as cash-flow and transaction data, to process credit scores for potential borrowers. Then it grants qualifiers loans without collateral. Most applicants, DeLuca says, have never applied for loans from their own banks because of the often onerous process, including putting up collateral.

AMP's credit-scoring technology lowers the cost of banking for this segment of the market, DeLuca says, something that should attract the attention of banks.

"Banks are going to say: 'We can do this, too; now how do we get the technology?' " said DeLuca, who is in the process of transitioning the company away from direct lending and towards providing credit and risk assessment technologies to banks.

But if banks are going to change, they have to be paying attention. There are signs, at least from some global banks, that lending to small firms is becoming increasingly undesirable as compliance costs mount and banks are handed eye-bulging fines.

As part of an agreement struck with US regulators in September, Standard Chartered last month notified thousands of small businesses in the United Arab Emirates that their accounts would be shut down within 30 days.

The New York Department of Financial Services said Standard Chartered failed to flag suspicious transactions that originated in the UAE and Hong Kong and handed the bank a US$300 million fine.

In the West, banks' share of corporate lending has fallen over the past six years, data from the International Monetary Fund showed. In the US, bank loans as a percentage of total loans to corporations declined from 20 per cent in 2008 to 12 per cent this year. In Britain, it dropped from 68 per cent to 44 per cent in the same period.

China is a crucible for disintermediation, the process by which people take their money somewhere other than the bank.

Alibaba Group Holding's bid in September to build a 1 trillion yuan lending marketplace for small and medium-sized firms should have turned heads at banks around the world. Far from resembling a traditional financial institution, the marketplace, called Zhao Cai Bao and officially launched in April with a 14 billion yuan lending capacity, is a platform for investors to lend directly to customers.

Most Zhao Cai Bao's customers will not come fresh from the loan approval line at Chinese banks. Alibaba will target buyers and sellers from its online retail universe of hundreds of millions of people, complete with internal credit scores based on the transactions they have made there. Many would have never applied for small bank loans.

Banks in Asia could be even slower to respond to these challenges than their Western counterparts, says David Jenson, a partner for global innovation and digital strategy at consultancy Ernst & Young in the US. Regional banks tend to avoid being first-movers in an increasingly risky environment.

"The biggest thing for the banking industry is risk aversion and the desire or need to go slowly - and those two things potentially are the kiss of death in the age of innovation," Jenson said.