Earnings Labs

Yiren Digital Ltd. (YRD)

Q4 2025 Earnings Call· Thu, Mar 19, 2026

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Yiren Digital Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Keyao He, Director of Investor Relations of Yiren Digital. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Keyao He

Analyst

Thank you, operator. Good morning, and good evening, everyone. Today's call features a presentation by our Founder, Chairman and CEO, Mr. Ning Tang; and our CFO, Mr. William Hui. There will be a question-and-answer session after the prepared remarks. Before beginning, we'd like to remind you that discussions during this call contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provision of U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and factors that can cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any such statements. Further information regarding such risks, uncertainties or factors is included in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as required under relevant law. During the call, we will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures and supplemental 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 U.S. GAAP. For information about those non-GAAP financial measures and the reconciliations to GAAP measures, please refer to our earnings press release. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. In addition, an investor presentation and a webcast replay of this conference call will be available on our IR website. I will now pass it on to our CEO, Mr. Tang, for opening remarks.

Ning Tang

Analyst

Thank you, Keyao. Good day, everyone, and thank you all for joining us. In 2025, we celebrated 10-year anniversary of our listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Together, we have reached many milestones. We made a breakthrough in our AI innovation where we completed regulatory filing of our own large language model, Zhiyu. In the second half of the year, we released our first multi-agent platform, Magicube. With support of these AI tools, we incubated our Internet insurance business, which has achieved strong growth quarter -- strong growth quarter-after-quarter in 2025. 2025 was also a year that demanded the best of us and our team delivered. Heightened credit regulations and industry-wide deterioration in credit quality created significant pressure across our business. Yet we navigated these headwinds with discipline and operational resilience. Equally important, we enter 2026 with growing confidence. Our next-generation fintech platform is gaining meaningful traction and validating the strategic investments we've made. I'm deeply grateful to our entire team for their dedication and resolve through one of the most challenging periods in our recent history. The rapid advancement of AI is fundamentally reshaping the industries we operate in, and we believe we are uniquely positioned to lead that transformation. Our years of deep vertical expertise in credit facilitation and insurance brokerage, combined with the AI infrastructure and agent technologies we've purposefully built give us a differentiated foundation to reimagine our business ecosystem, accelerating growth and unlocking new avenues of innovation. Amid these challenges, we made meaningful progress on the 2 strategic priorities that will define Yiren Digital's next chapter, the continued scaling of Internet insurance distribution as our second core growth engine and the accelerating integration of AI capabilities across our business operations. Both are delivering results and both give us confidence in the trajectory ahead. For…

Ka Hui

Analyst

Thank you, Ning. Hello, everyone. I will be walking you through our financial performance for the fourth quarter and full year 2025. Please refer to our earnings release and IR deck for further details, both available on our website. This quarter reflects continued progress across several of our key strategic priorities. First, our investment in AI are beginning to translate into tangible outcomes. We achieved direct net cost savings of approximately RMB 80 million, driven by improvements in areas such as high sales conversion, customer service automation and risk management efficiency. This figure excludes other business benefits from AI such as avoidance of fraud losses, savings from staff training and other indirect cost savings because of AI. In addition, our proprietary AI technology is beginning to generate revenue in new business within the credit solutions and Internet insurance segment. Second, our Internet insurance business continues to gain momentum. During the quarter, we recorded gross written premiums of RMB 50 million, representing 95% quarter-over-quarter growth. The annualized premium reached RMB 267 million in the fourth quarter, representing 36% growth quarter-over-quarter, up from a negligible amount in the fourth quarter of 2024. The revenue accounted for 22% of the revenue from our entire insurance segment in the fourth quarter of 2025. We expect this revenue contribution to continue to grow and take a bigger revenue share in 2026. For the credit solutions business, 2025 was a unique year. We began with a very good growth momentum, seeing a 43% growth in loan facilitation volume in the first half of 2025. However, we subsequently faced a downward trend in the credit cycle alongside with regulatory changes. In the second half of 2025, we shift our strategic priority to credit quality over loan growth, resulting in a 22% year-over-year contraction in our loan volume.…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from [ Connie Gu ] with [indiscernible].

Unknown Analyst

Analyst

And my question is about AI. You mentioned that internal AI transformation has brought significant cost savings to the company in 2025. So looking to the longer term, do you expect further cost savings or a broader potential for AI application scenarios? And when we compare in-house developed AI agents to the third-party ones, what are the specific advantages? And how do you view the security of the popular AI tools lately like open?

Ning Tang

Analyst

Thank you for your question regarding AI. And actually, let me, explain more, talk more about our AI strategy. And I think it's extremely important because we are, as I reported earlier on, redefining the company. Yes, previously, it's a fintech company utilizing technology to do better finance credit work to begin with. Then we included insurance. But in the future, it's going to be an AI agent, AI native company, not only for credit and insurance subsectors, but also for more financial services subsectors and a few select industries in the coming couple of years. So basically, it's going to be a different value proposition evolving from our past. Let me explain more. Yes. So when we first started to utilize AI. It was more like a tool for cost savings to do our existing processes better, cheaper. Yes, AI as a tool. That's like in like 2023, 2024, but from last year and even more so this year, you just mentioned the [ OpenClaw ], AI is now a colleague is now a person, yes, a worker. So that means we are going to do businesses differently. We're going to reengineer our business processes for credit and insurance existing businesses. And at the same time, because our technologies, our AI capabilities have been well tested, proven in this heavily regulated demanding super tight security standard industries, sectors, our AI capabilities, our agents can be utilized for other financial services needs, subsectors and going beyond financial services subsectors to more industries. So this is the strategy. This is the development process, yes. So going forward, we're going to do AI more and more for our credit, for our insurance businesses. But at the same time, we'll look for more subsectors in financial services and new verticals beyond financial services to leverage our AI capabilities, proven capabilities, yes. So this is the strategy we have. And my vision is after 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, Yiren Digital will be a different company. It's not totally away from our traditional businesses. They will do -- we will do like credit, we'll do insurance. These are great applications for AI. But at the same time, we're going to do more. Yes, there are better also subsectors for AI applications, agents and growth for us going forward. So this is the strategy we have in mind, and we are executing. Thank you.

Ka Hui

Analyst

Yes. Just to add to Ning's comment with the numbers, in 2025, we already achieved a cost saving of RMB 80 million, and that is on top -- and those are the direct -- just the direct costs, and that's on top of other indirect cost savings such as the avoidance of fraud losses, which was approximately RMB 180 million last year and also other costs like the staff training and office space and all that. So I think just to add on to Ning's comments, we are transforming the company from just being using the AI to save cost to using the AI to generate revenue. So the -- what AI will help us is it will reduce our time to market with the technologies and also the analytics that will help us to identify new business opportunities.

Operator

Operator

The next question will come from [ Wang Yang ] with [indiscernible] Securities.

Unknown Analyst

Analyst

[Interpreted] Since the new loan facilitation regulation issued in October 2025, the industry has generally experienced a significant impact. Has the company seen any improvement in this effect so far? How do you expect the industry risk environment to evolve over the course of the year?

Ka Hui

Analyst

Okay. Thank you. Thank you for your questions. Based on our credit performance metrics, our risk level peak in the last October and now showing signs of recovery. The new industry regulation had a short-term impact on us, our funding partners and our peers. We believe the industry has already adapted to this short-term impact, position itself for better long-term development. Our January FPD30 and DPD30 metrics, which track 30 days delinquency rate have dropped by 38% to the level seen in May 2025 when this cycle began. When the new regulation took effect in October, our cost of capital -- sorry, since the new regulation took effect in October, our cost of capital has decreased by 93 basis points. Meanwhile, our customer acquisition cost as a percentage of loan volume continued to drop by another 0.8% to a record low now. So indicating after the new regulation, the competition is -- has been eased, and we view this as a positive signal. And our balance sheet remains solid, providing the financial strength to manage potential risk as these improvements continue to flow through the business. But overall, we remain confident in the long-term fundamentals of our business. We think the new business will make the industry healthier. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question will come from [ Yulong Yu ].

Unknown Analyst

Analyst

[Interpreted] I have noticed that the company's Internet insurance distribution business has demonstrated strong breakout growth. Could you elaborate on the development targets and strategic priorities for this segment in the new year? Additionally, compared with traditional insurance distribution models, where do you see our key competitive advantages are?

Ning Tang

Analyst

Okay. Let me take the first crack and yes, William can add to it. The insurance -- internet insurance business market potential is very big. Yes. And you may well remember that our credit facilitation business actually was quite offline several years ago. And then we successfully moved it to online to, yes, digitally transform the business. That was absolutely necessary, the right thing to do, bring us growth opportunities. And the same is happening for our insurance brokerage business, but not exactly the same, let me explain. Well, more and more businesses are moving online, yes. So the online part will be bigger and bigger contribution to our insurance business, top line, bottom line. And the same is happening as the credit business going from offline to online. The difference is we will still have offline part, but that offline part is also going to be more and more kind of like the so-called offline and online, meaning our offline colleagues will do more and more online activities like live streaming, like WeChat, Douyin kind of applications. We'll do that more and more. So the offline part will be also more and more effective. And as you have seen, the online part, the purely online part is showing great potential, super fast growth. And that's also very promising. So going forward, the insurance brokerage business will have this, yes, high growing like online part and also a more efficient like offline part kind of being offline, online combined model. Yes. So this is the vision we have for our insurance business. And William, do you have anything to add? And by the way, I'd like to add something why like our online Internet insurance business is growing, yes, so fast, much faster than our credit business transforming from offline to online because pretty much all the tools have been built for the credit business, the analytics, the AI agents, capabilities, so on, have been built. So it's a much faster acceleration process. And the same logic goes for what I just mentioned, us moving to other like verticals, other industries, the same kind of AI infrastructure, the agent capabilities have been built. Of course, we need to add new kind of like vertical domain expertise. That's also essential. But to begin with, the technology platform capabilities have been built. So it's a much faster, much accelerated process. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And that will conclude our question-and-answer session. If you have any further questions, please connect to the IR team of the Yiren Digital or Piacente Financial Communications. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.