WeChat wants to rate users based on payment behavior

WeChat, China’s “one app to rule them all,” has quietly launched its own social credit system. That means it plans to give a score to its users based on their financial performance.

If you’re familiar with China’s social credit system, this news may sound creepy. But before you tweet about this with the word “Orwellian” in all caps, hold off a bit because this isn’t quite as frightening as that. WeChat’s credit-scoring system is reportedly more about gaining perks for being good than receiving punishment for being bad.

The new system, called WeChat Pay Score, is similar to rival Alipay’s Sesame Credit. It gives scores based on WeChat Pay’s data on users’ personal consumption, compliance, and other behavior (like fulfilling obligations on time).

Sesame Credit, on the other hand, tracks data on users’ consumption and habits, and gives a score based on which a user can get certain perks. The perk may be a deposit waiver or even the option to apply for a visa without providing bank statements.

However, there is one notable difference in WeChat’s new system. The social media platform told reporters on Wednesday at the WeChat Open Class Pro event that the system is based on social relationships within WeChat, with scores between friends influencing each other.

We asked the company for clarification: they cast doubt on the reports, but declined to explain further.

A surprising number of countries now accept payments through WeChat Pay or Alipay.

If the reports are accurate, it could mean that your score would be affected by your friends’ scores. Luckily, the program is opt-in, which is good if your friends aren’t good with money – and let’s face it, most aren’t (well, mine aren’t).

WeChat is famously China’s app that can do everything – from hailing a cab to ordering food and booking a hotel – and you can pay for it all directly with WeChat Pay. That’s a lot of data, so maybe it’s not surprising that WeChat wants to do more with the spending behavior of its customers.

However, it’s not clear if the data will feed into the state-sponsored social credit system, which, judging by the analysis available, has the potential to be scary in an Orwellian sense. The system, which is scheduled to roll out by 2020, has a red list for rewarding good citizens and a blacklist for punishing people with bad behavior.

I tried to check my own WeChat score, but the function is still limited to only seven cities. It’s been in testing stage since November 2018.

This isn’t the first time that Tencent has attempted to pull together a credit-scoring system. Tencent and Alibaba are two of eight companies selected by the government to develop pilot programs for consumer credit scores in 2015.

But China’s central bank pulled the plug on the project in February 2018, citing concern that the companies might use it to push their own financial products. Tencent Credit was shut down on the same month.