WeBank
“Can a Tencent-distributed, AI-underwritten digital bank serve hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers and SMBs profitably without ever opening a branch?”
WeBank was founded in 2014 as China's first privately-owned, fully digital bank, backed by Tencent and distributed entirely through WeChat and QQ rather than physical branches. Its core product WeiLiDai (微粒贷) is a micro-loan delivered inside Tencent's super-apps, leveraging face recognition and big-data credit scoring rather than collateral. The company is essentially a tech-first internet bank: it operates its own distributed core banking stack, holds its own banking license, and is itself an embedded-finance provider (lending inside WeChat) rather than a buyer of third-party embedded-finance infrastructure.