The pungent smell of fried squid on sticks wafts into the chill humid air of Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan district. Here, in a nondescript of¬fice building alongside traditional Chinese medicine shops selling deer horn and dried caterpillar, WeLabco-founder Simon Loong hopes to play a significant role in dragging Hong Kong’s retail lending sector into the digital era.
香港上环(Sheung Wan)寒冷潮湿的空气中飘着一股炸鱿鱼串的刺鼻气味，卖鹿茸和干虫草的传统中药店旁坐落着一栋不起眼的办公楼。在这栋楼里办公的WeLab联合创始人龙沛智(Simon Loong)期望，自己的公司能在引领香港零售贷款业进入数字时代方面发挥重要作用。

The target market is small to midsized borrowers, who have traditionally had few sources from which to obtain funds conveniently and affordably in Hong Kong. Even online applications to commercial banks can involve a branch visit, while micro financing companies, which lend to low-income consumers, charge high rates to compensate for the inevitably less rigorous credit checks and higher default rates.
该公司瞄准的市场是中小借贷者。在香港，这类借贷者一向没有什么渠道方便而廉价地获取资金。即使是向商业银行在线申请贷款，可能也需要去分支行面谈，而面向低收入顾客放贷的小额融资公司，则收取高息来弥补肯定不那么严格的信用审核和更高的违约率带来的损失。
WeLab aims to be faster, cheaper and more convenient. “Internet finance is about providing efficient alternatives,” rather than identifying “new needs”, says Mr Loong. It has particular users in mind: “We design our product for tech-savvy young consumers.” These are people who want to avoid having to go to a bank branch and to avoid being subjected to cross-selling.
WeLab的目标是更快、更廉价、更方便。龙沛智表示，“互联网金融的宗旨在于提供高效的替代品”，而不是甄别“新需求”。它着眼于特定的用户群体。“我们设计的产品是面向精通科技的年轻顾客。”这类顾客不想为了申贷而不得不跑银行网点，也不想成为交叉销售(cross-selling)的对象。
A former commercial banker with 15 years’ experience at Citibank and Standard Chartered, Mr Loong set up WeLab in 2013. The smart-suited, soft-spoken CEO is speaking in a small, glass walled room in a corner of the company’s 2,000 sq ft head office, that barely fits a desk and two chairs. Sitting next to a window covered with notes scribbled in marker pen, he talks persuasively about his desire to offer “attractive alternatives” to borrowers, especially those who struggle to obtain funds from lenders that use traditional risk-checking tools.
龙沛智曾是一名商业银行家，在花旗银行(Citibank)和渣打银行(Standard Chartered)总共效力了15年，他在2013年创立了WeLab。这名穿着得体、说话温和的WeLab行政总裁，在一个玻璃墙小房间里接受采访，这个房间位于该公司占地2000平方英尺的总部办公室的一角，面积小得勉强放下一张桌子和两把椅子。他的座位旁有一扇窗户，窗上贴满了便条，上面用记号笔龙飞凤舞地写着什么。他令人信服地谈到，他渴望将“有吸引力的替代品”提供给借贷者，尤其是那些很难从使用传统风险评估工具的贷款机构获得资金的借贷者。
WeLab has developed its own software, WeDefend, designed to enable rapid credit assessment without compromising on accurate pricing. Mr Loong is reluctant to reveal details, but he does say that WeDefend relies on information provided by the customer as well as data published online.
WeLab开发了自有软件WeDefend，该软件旨在帮助WeLab在不影响准确定价的前提下快速完成信用评估。龙沛智不愿透露细节，但他明确表示WeDefend依赖于顾客提供的信息以及网上公布的数据。
For instance, information garnered from search engines such as Google and Baidu can help to verify identity. Still, weeding out bad apples is not as simple as counting Facebook friends, he says: “Thieves and good people both have friends.” If a customer is reluctant to share personal information, “they don’t get the money”. WeLend, the flagship product, has so far experienced no fraud on its loan book, although it has encountered fraudulent applicants.
例如，从搜索引擎如谷歌(Google)和百度收集的信息能够帮助验证身份。不过，筛除“烂苹果”可不像统计Facebook好友那么简单，龙沛智表示：“盗贼也好，好人也罢，都是有朋友的。”如果顾客不愿分享个人信息，“他们就得不到钱”。该公司的旗舰产品WeLend虽然遇到过不诚实的申请者，但到目前为止从未被成功骗贷。
In the early days WeLab itself struggled to persuade service providers of its legitimacy: “Hong Kong is unused to start-ups,” Mr Loong says. Without a history landlords were reluctant to provide premises or banks to open ac¬counts. “You need a one-year trading record, but how can you [get started and] grow without these things?” Mr Loong says.
营业初期，WeLab花了很大力气来说服服务提供商相信该公司有存在的道理。龙沛智说：“香港还不习惯于接纳创业型企业”。如果一家企业没有营业记录，房东不愿向它提供办公场所，银行也不愿为它开立账户。“你得有一年的营业记录。但没有上面这些东西，你怎能（起步并）成长起来呢？”
Funding was not such a problem. The first round of capital raising in 2013 garnered $2m from friends and family, beating the target of $1.3m. Then last year some big name investors injected $20m in equity: Tom Group, a Hong Kong listed media company that is 36.7 per cent-owned by Li Ka-shing’s flagship conglomerates Hutchison Whampoa and Cheung Kong, and Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital were among them.
资金方面倒没有遇到这样的问题。第一轮融资是在2013年，从朋友和家人那里融来了200万美元，比130万美元的目标要高。接着在去年，一些大名鼎鼎的投资者通过入股注资了2000万美元，其中包括TOM集团(Tom Group)和硅谷的红杉资本(Sequoia Capital)。TOM集团是一家在港上市的媒体公司，李嘉诚(Li Ka-shing)的旗舰企业集团长江和记实业(CK Hutchison)持有该公司36.7%的股份。
The journey to WeLab’s conception began in a Stanford Graduate School of Business dormitory room in 2010. Mr Loong had taken time to help his fiancée settle in for her MBA. As he flicked through her coursework, he realised further study might benefit him too. He requested a sabbatical and enrolled for a Masters in Science and Management, also at Stanford, relocating from his home in Hong Kong.
WeLab构想的形成过程始于2010年斯坦福大学商学院(Stanford Graduate School of Business)的一间宿舍。当时龙沛智的未婚妻来这里读MBA，龙沛智在帮她整理宿舍。他快速翻阅了下未婚妻的课程作业，意识到进一步的学习可能对自己也有帮助。于是他申请了学术休假，离开香港的家搬到这里，进入斯坦福大学攻读科学与管理硕士学位。
The course changed his understanding of finance as well as his own ambitions. “I discovered how small my world was. It was just people who wanted to move money around and that’s it.” His studies introduced him to professionals from a variety of backgrounds and in¬spired him to look beyond a conventional career in finance. Becoming CEO of a bank — the “best I could do, if all the stars had realigned” — no longer seemed like “fun”. His studies had highlighted that financial services were ripe for disruption by technology: the crisis of 2008 had presented an opportunity for new models of consumer banking. He set about launching WeLab.
课程改变了他对金融和自身抱负的理解。“我发现我的圈子太小了，就是些想推动资金转来转去的人，然后就没别的了。”这段学习让他认识了各种背景的专业人士，并鼓舞他将目光投向常规的金融职业生涯之外。在他看来，在一家银行作首席执行官的梦想似乎已不再有趣（他以前曾认为，“如果发生奇迹，我最想做的就是成为一家银行的首席执行官”）。这段学习让他深刻意识到，用科技去颠覆金融服务业的时机已经成熟：2008年的危机提供了一个建立消费银行业务新模式的机会。他开始着手创立WeLab。
Its growth has been encouraging, he says. In the fourth quarter of last year, loan applications at WeLend quadrupled year on year. By mid-April 2015, WeLend had received re¬quests for a total of nearly $170m, up 40 per cent from the end of 2014; the average loan is about $10,000, the maximum $65,000.
他表示，WeLab的发展一直令人鼓舞。去年第四季度，WeLend的贷款申请同比翻了两番。到2015年4月中旬，WeLend收到的申请额总计近1.7亿美元，相比2014年底增长了40%；贷款额平均为1万美元左右，最大一笔为6.5万美元。
Mr Loong declines to reveal the size of the loan book, but as WeLab’s confidence in its credit risk evaluation has improved, approvals have risen from 10-15 per cent of applications to 20-25 per cent. This is un¬like¬ly to rise much more: taking on riskier customers might need debt collection, raising costs and altering the online-only model.
龙沛智不愿透露贷款账目的大小，但随着WeLab对其信用风险评估的信心逐步提升，批贷比例已从10%到15%升至20%到25%。这个比例不太可能再上升很多：接受风险更高的顾客可能需要追债、提高成本和改变只做线上业务的模式。
Hong Kong has demonstrated the efficacy of WeLab’s credit assessment technology, so the company is expanding to mainland China. The mainland site, Wolaidai (“I will lend”), operates a peer-to-peer model, which links small scale lenders and borrowers, limiting WeLab’s capital commitment to China’s $40bn unregulated online lending market. Still, risk assessment remains rigorous to ensure healthy growth: “The platform will get destroyed if individual lenders are blowing up,” says Mr Loong.
WeLab信用评估技术的有效性已在香港得到证明，因此该公司正将业务扩大到中国内地。该公司在内地的网站“我来贷”(wolaidai.com)是基于P2P模式，为小额贷款人和小额借款人牵线搭桥，这将WeLab的出资承诺限定在了内地的400亿美元无监管在线借贷市场。尽管如此，该公司仍坚持严格的风险评估，以确保能够健康发展。龙沛智表示：“如果个人贷款者搞砸了，这个平台也会完蛋。”
In order to test its credit assessment technology on a homogeneous group, Wolaidai limited its initial foray to student loans of no more than Rmb6,000 (about $965). One advantage of this group, says Mr Loong, is that the students have “a lot of data online”; a maximum 12-month term also ensured that repayment became due before graduation.
为了测试其针对某一同质群体的信用评估技术，“我来贷”将最初的业务限定为助学贷款，每笔最多6000元人民币（约合965美元）。龙沛智表示，这个群体的一大优势是，学生们有“大量的在线数据”；最长12个月的还款期限也确保了学生毕业前要还清贷款。
Starting in Guangdong, Wolaidai has now expanded beyond students, and Mr Loong expects the China loan book to surpass that of Hong Kong within months. About 70 of the company’s 100 staff are in mainland China, with the rest in Hong Kong and India.
“我来贷”在广东起步，现在的服务对象已不仅限于学生。龙沛智预期该公司在中国内地的贷款额会在数月内超越香港。该公司的100名员工有近70名在中国内地，其余在香港和印度。
Wolaidai is developing new growth op¬portunities. Last month, it launched a website with Chinese smartphone manufacturer Coolpad to facilitate instalment payments for mobile phone purchases. Aware of the value of “owning” the customer, WeLab does not simply provide credit checking software, the site is co-branded and the revenues are shared with the vendor partner.
“我来贷”正在拓展新的增长机会。今年3月，它推出了与中国智能手机制造商酷派(Coolpad)合建的一个网站，方便购买手机的用户分期付款。WeLab认识到了“拥有”顾客的价值，它除了提供信用评估软件外，还为该网站冠以联合品牌，收入则与供货商合作伙伴分享。
Back in WeLab’s Hong Kong neighbourhood, the traditional Chinese medicine shops are being replaced on the fringes by French cafés and American diners. Mr Loong will be hoping WeLab can have a similar transformative impact on traditional banking services.
回过头来看看WeLab香港总部所在的社区，街角的传统中药店正被法式咖啡馆和美式小餐馆取代。龙沛智肯定希望WeLab能对传统银行业服务产生类似的革命性影响。
Hiring: The skills puzzle
招聘：技能拼图
Finding staff has been one of WeLab’s big challenges. Finance professionals, the earliest recruits, were sceptical about leaving their secure roles in big organisations, so coaxing the first employees to join required a lot of persuasion, including sharing equity, says Simon Loong, who would not disclose the size of his own stake.
招兵买马一直是WeLab面临的一大挑战。龙沛智表示，该公司要招的第一批人，也就是那些金融专业人士，对离开他们在大公司的安稳位子加入该公司持怀疑态度，所以劝诱这批人加入要做大量的说服工作，包括分给他们WeLab的股份。龙沛智不愿透露自己持有多少股份。
In addition, WeLab could not find enough professionals with the right balance of finance and technology skills. After the first locally recruited technology partner did not work out, WeLab hired a chief technology officer from Singapore and programmers in India.
此外，WeLab找不到足够多的、金融和技术两方面技能都不错的专业人才。由于在香港当地招到的首个技术合伙人不太理想，WeLab从新加坡聘请了一名首席技术官，在印度招聘了程序员。
In the early days, quarterly trips to Hong Kong helped the India team to integrate with the rest of the company. But later, weekly trips for the Singapore chief technology officer took their toll and the role has now been split between a head of technology in Hong Kong and another in China.
一开始，这些人每季度到香港出差一次，这有助于印度团队融入整个公司。但后来，新加坡的首席技术官每周一次的出差让公司付出了不小的成本，该岗位的职责现在被分为两半，由香港的一名技术主管和中国内地的一名技术主管分别负责。
Mr Loong says one seasoned equity investor advised him: “You don’t always find the perfect piece of the puzzle first time.”
龙沛智表示，一名股票投资老手曾劝他道：“你不总是一下子就能找到那块最合适的拼图零片。”