When Dayi Loans and Yongji Loans were first established we had decided to work together with local people. We empowered them to help friends and families to gain microloans, and to develop financially. Therefore, we first look for the rural elites in a village to be our partners. Then we provide capital resources and pass on our many years of management experience and societal resources to develop their skills, thus establishing teams of local experts. After the local talent has sufficiently matured we officially open the company and enter the local market. For example, Dayi Microcredit was a product of Dayi Tuwang Poverty Alleviation Research Center. Today it is still employed by local people. This center services Yuelai, Jinyuan, Anren Township and 20 other townships in the nearby countryside. Meanwhile, Yongji Loans was a product of Beijing Fuping School and Puzhou Fruit Association. In less than two years it already provided loans for over 1600 households. By empowering the locals to develop small loan business is the most unique characteristic of these two microcredit companies. The goal is that as soon as local people have the necessary skills and experience to undertake work as brokers, even if we retract the team of experts that trained them, the locals can still take the reins, keeping up the business on their own. This is following the idea of the old proverb “teaching a man to fish will feed him for a lifetime”. In this way, the local people have an opportunity to develop economically in the long term.

The two micro-loan companies we established have one thing in common: They are real “micro-credit” companies. Even though the loans are small—no larger than 50,000RMB—loan candidates are carefully screened since they have no collateral. These are exactly the ones that we target to serve. The most important point is this: these are genuinely “credit” based loans. What this means in concrete terms is we gather a consensus about the borrower’s productivity and relevant details about their life from our social connections established in the community, the village council, their close friends, and people from low and high positions in their company. After the broker has compared, analysed and evaluated and making certain everything is trustworthy, we use it as the loan’s foundation. This is how we can make the customer rely on “credit” to get capital. Other than this, we also provide relevant knowledge about “credit” and “credit checking” to our customers, train rural households about credit, and are able to assist them in improving management of their own credit. These methods are all meeting with the real rural people’s value system. We’ve helped rural people to become aware of the concept of credit. We lower their costs of business and simultaneously improve their ability to continue business.