Baidu invests in ZestFinance to develop search-powered credit scoring for China - Artificial Intelligence Online

Baidu has made its second investment in a U.S. fintech company inside a month after it put an undisclosed sum of money into ZestFinance, a big data firm specializing in credit scoring. Baidu, which operates China's dominant search platform, took part in a 60 million round for payments firm Circle in June. The deal is part of an agreement that will see Baidu use ZestFinance's technology to develop a credit scoring platform that is based on its search data. That's important in a market like China because traditional credit systems are broken there. There's precious little formalized credit history data while many people don't use banks heavily or are unbanked.