Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for participating in the First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call for FinVolution Group. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks there will be a question-and-answer session. Today's conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to your host, Jimmy Tan, Head of Investor Relations for the company. Jimmy, please go ahead.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. The company results were issued via Newswire services earlier today and are posted online. You can download the earnings release and sign up for the company e-mail alerts by visiting the IR section of our website at ir.finvgroup.com. Mr. Feng Zhang, our Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Jiayuan Xu, our Chief Financial Officer will start the call with their prepared remarks and conclude with a Q&A session. During this call, we will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures to review and assess our operating performance. These non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with US GAAP. For information about these non-GAAP measures and reconciliation to GAAP measures, please refer to our earnings press release. Before we continue, please note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. As such, the company results may be materially different from the views expressed today. Further information regarding these and other risks and uncertainties are included in the company's filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required under applicable law. Finally, we post a slide presentation on our IR website providing details of our results for the quarter. I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Mr. Feng Zhang. Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, Jimmy. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our earnings call. Due to the lockdown in Shanghai, our management team are dialing in from their homes, so please bear with us if we encounter any technical difficulties during the call. We're happy to speak with you today following the successful completion of another strong quarter against multiple headwinds. Since March 2020, Shanghai has been under lockdown due to the pandemic and similar lockdowns have been imposed upon additional cities in recent weeks. Furthermore, other fluctuations afflicting 2021's macro environment persisted through the first quarter of 2022 and have affected certain aspects of our business operations. However, our strong technological foundation and strategic transition towards better quality borrowers enabled us to flexibly navigate challenges and deliver solid consistent first quarter results, highlighted by our eighth consecutive quarter-over-quarter growth in total transaction volume, in line with our expectation. We achieved record-setting total transaction volume of RMB39.7 billion this quarter, representing a year-over-year increase of 48% and a sequential increase of 2%. Now, let me share some other major achievements for the first quarter. As we relentlessly and skillfully execute our strategy to acquire better quality borrowers, transaction volume originated for new borrowers surged to RMB6.4 billion, an increase of 14% year-over-year. Notably, our total outstanding loan balance also increased to RMB53.8 billion as of March 31, 2022, representing an increase of 66% year-over-year and 7% sequentially. Thanks to our progressive shift towards better quality borrowers, our ever evolving credit risk assessment and our self-developed proprietary technologies such as Platform 9.75. We have stabilized our risk metrics at [indiscernible] low levels while continuously growing our transaction volume. Platform 9.75 is an algorithm learning system, which combines automatic model design, deployment and management into an one step platform that requires just 100 seconds…

Thank you, Feng, and hello everyone. Welcome to our first quarter 2022 earnings call. In the interest of time, I will not go through all of the financial line items on this call. Please refer to our earnings release for further details. As Feng mentioned, we are encouraged that despite multiple challenges in the first quarter, we still achieved quarterly transaction volumes goals for the eighth consecutive quarter, while maintaining our risk metrics that are relatively at stable level. Our transaction to better quality borrowers coupled with strengthened relationships with funding partners and consistent technological enhancements. The loan approval rate for our funding partner rose to 76% in March, compared to 62% in the same period last year. Our pipeline of potential partners remain strong and we are confident to achieve meaningful improvement in our funding cost in the near future. Driven by our consistent efforts in research and development, we have continuously enhanced our share of technologies throughout our business operations, including customer acquisition, the credit risk assessment among other areas. These efforts have been validated by much more improvement across our operational metrics. Leveraging these trends, our net revenues for the first quarter rose to RMB2.4 billion, an increase of 16% year-over-year. Even more encouragingly, we also delivered a strong non-GAAP operating profit of RMB602 million and maintained a substantial balance sheet with RMB10.8 billion in total shareholders' equity. During the first quarter, our average borrowing cost remained stable at around 24.3% compared with 26.7% in the same period last year. On particular note, nearly all loans originated for our new borrowers are in the 24%, reflecting our ongoing commitment to financial inclusion and our growing ability to allow with regulatory directives. We maintained our take rate for the quarter at a stable pace of 3.9%. Together with…

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from Yada Li with CICC. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language] Okay. Then I'll do the translation part. So the first one is on the funding side. So due to the limited supply, our funding costs actually increased in the fourth quarter last year and are there any improvement this quarter? And what can we expect to see and what is the trend of the funding cost in the future? And the second one is about our international business. So, could you please elaborate more on the progress of our product development and also on the optimization of our client base? Thanks.

[Foreign Language]

Hi, Yada, This is Jimmy. Let me do the translation for you. Our all-in funding costs in the first quarter was around 7.8% and going forward, from the industry we see a significant demand for better quality borrowers this year. And during the next few quarters, we are very confident that our funding cost will improve by between 30 to 50 bps. And apart from the funding cost trend, we also see that our approval rates from our funding partners has been improved greatly. And this has actually greatly improved our operating efficiency. These metrics actually improved from 60% to 76% on a year-on-year basis.

[Foreign Language]

Yada, this is Jimmy again. I'll do the translation for you. For our international business, during the second half of 2021, we have been transitioning to better quality borrowers, just like what we have been doing in China. And we have actually experienced better than expectation progress in the transition to better quality borrowers. You can actually see that on a year-over-year basis, our transaction volume grew by 13% from RMB760 million to RMB860 million. And of particular note, our outstanding loan balance grew by 44% from RMB215 million to RMB360 million. And at the same time, the proportion of our better quality customers also experienced improvement and grew from -- grew to 54% in the first quarter of '22 -- in the first quarter of 2022 from just 28% in the same period last year. And lastly, you can also see that from the proportion of our installment loans, this proportion actually grew to 55% in the first quarter from the same period of 22% last year.

[Foreign Language]

[Foreign Language]

Our next question will come from Frank Zheng with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language] Let me quickly translate myself. Thank you, management for giving me the opportunity to ask questions. I have two questions. The first is on credit quality. We see that 19-day plus delinquency continues to rise slightly in the first quarter. Can management give more color on early risk indicators in second quarter-to-date? What kind of adjustments have company done for better risk management and what's your outlook going forward for the second quarter as well as the second half of this year as we gradually recover from COVID? My second question is a quick follow-up on the international markets. For international markets, what kind of growth in terms of volume and earnings contribution should we expect for this year? Thank you.

[Foreign Language]

Hi Frank, this is Jimmy. Let me do the translation for Alex. Okay. I know the market is very concerned about the impact of the pandemic and we have also shared our -- some credit risk earlier. For example, our vintage delinquency in the first quarter is around 2.4% and this is about 5% fluctuation compared to the previous set of quarters. And on our existing loan balance, the credit performance is expected to increase by another 5% to 10%. And if you compare the situation today with the Wuhan locked down back in 2020, the situation today is actually a lot better, because the fluctuation back then was more than 10%. This is because of the transition to better quality borrowers, which -- strategy which we have been adopting over the last few years. And if you take a look today, the proportion of our better quality borrowers in China actually in the first quarter was around 70% compared to around 50% back then. And let me now talk about our early-day delinquency metrics. Our day one delinquency was about 5.3% in the first quarter versus 5.6% in the previous quarter. However, due to the impact of the pandemic, our day one delinquency increased to 5.5% in May, which is still within our estimation.

[Foreign Language]

Hi Frank, let me do the translation again. For our international business side, we didn't have aggressive loan volume growth target because our strategy this year is to transit to better quality borrowers. And based on the current data, the transitional progress is better than expectation. And we are very strong -- we have a very strong confidence that our growth momentum for our international business will continue in the second half of the year and also this is able to diversify away from the risk that we faced in China like the lock down in different cities in China.

[Foreign Language]

[Foreign Language]

Our next question will come from Alex Ye with UBS. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language] So I have two questions. First one, it's on pricing. So we have an average loan pricing of 24.3% in Q1, which is flat from previous quarter. So as we are approaching the June deadline for the 24% cap, so what's the plan ahead on complying to debt and what's the outlook on average loan pricing? And what is the implication on your take rate? How do you expect your full year take rate to trend compared to Q1? And my second question is on your loan application. So how does your overall loan application compared to the same period last year, do you see a visible decline? So are you concerned that due to the on and off of the COVID resurgence, which could lead to -- the borrowers becoming more conservative in their borrowing behaviors and how would that affect your future growth prospect? Thank you.

[Foreign Language]

Alex, this is Jimmy. Let me do the translation. Our take rate in the first quarter for our – our pricing in the first quarter was 24.3%, and please bear in mind that in the fourth quarter of last year, our proportion of loans under IRR going forward was 80% and during the first quarter of 2021, this proportion further increased to 84%. We believe we are ready in terms of customer preparation, financials preparation, and regulations, compliance preparation. With going forward right, we will maintain certain flexibility on pricing and we believe that in the second half of the year, our pricing will still be around 24%. Our take rate in the first quarter was around -- in the first quarter was 3.9%. We actually have stated earlier, we expect funding cost will improve in the second half of the year, but as our risk has also some fluctuations that will -- this will be offset and our take rate will rapidly maintain at this level.

[Foreign Language]

[Foreign Language]

[Foreign Language]

Alex, let me do the translation. There is some impact on our [activeness] (ph) as it has some fluctuations, but the impact is less than 5% and you -- we also noticed that China has introduced positive policy measures to boost consumer confidence and thus, we are adopting a cautiously optimistic attitude going forward.

[Foreign Language]

[Foreign Language] Thank you. That's all from me.

Thank you, Alex.

As there are no further questions, now I'd like to turn the call back over to the company for closing remarks.

Hello, everyone. Thank you once again for joining us today. If you have any further question, please feel free to contact FinVolution's investor teams. Thank you so much.

This concludes this conference call. You may now disconnect your line. Thank you.