JD.com’s fintech arm hires former chief executive of China’s first P2P lender Yirendai
- Fang Yihan will head up Dongrich, JD Digits’ subsidiary that provides wealth management products for affluent Chinese families
JD Digits, the fintech arm of Chinese e-commerce player JD.com, has poached Yirendai’s former chief executive Fang Yihan away, the company confirmed with KrASIA on Sunday. Fang has joined Dongrich as its chief executive.
Dongrich is JD Digits’ subsidiary that provides wealth management products for affluent Chinese families.
After a decade of working experience in the United States, Fang returned to China in 2011 and joined Beijing-based CreditEase, a Chinese fintech conglomerate, to lead a project the eventually gave birth to Yirendai, China’s first peer-to-peer lending platform. In four years, Fang and her team took Yirendai to the NYSE in 2015.
In the middle of this year, Fang resigned from her position for personal reasons as CEO of Yirendai, the company announced in its earnings release in July. Tang Ning, founder and CEO of CreditEase, filled in since then.
Yirendai said, in the same earnings release, that it has finished all transactions to buy assets from its parent company CreditEase and rebranded itself as Yiren Digital, which would include two main businesses – Yiren Credit and Yiren Wealth, catering to peer-to-peer lending and wealth management clientele respectively.
However, the rebranding and the restructuring moves have not overturned the declining streak of Yirendai’s stock price. Yirendai slid from US$12.03, the closing price on July 9 one day prior to the earnings announcement, to close at US$7.08 last Friday. Furthermore, Yirendai’s share price has dived more than 60 per cent from one year ago and 80 per cent from two years ago.
Fang’s departure from Yirendai comes at a time when the company is under pressure from China’s tighter regulation of the peer-to-peer lending sector, where players have been asked to cut the size of outstanding loans, the number of borrowers and investors.
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