Can Qifu Technology's AI-Plus Credit Strategy Fuel Future Growth?

Qifu Technology, Inc.’s QFIN AI-Plus credit strategy has been rolling out since the beginning of 2025. This initiative aims to build the industry’s first AI agent platform to empower core credit processes. The company established its deep bank division, which is propelling the R&D of its AI Plus bank agent products to support the intelligent upgrade of financial institutions.

An internal AI agent platform was introduced in April and the company deployed five digital employees across data analytics, risk management strategy, operations, financial reconciliation and compliance by May, highlighting its rapid operational integration. QFIN has successfully embedded the AI agent “ChatBI,” providing real-time insights and attribution analysis, vital for strategy optimization and improved decision-making efficiency.

Risk management is instrumental to QFIN’s business and thus, a pilot LLM-backed framework utilizing DeepSeek to train past decision logs yielded a significant improvement in Area Under Curve to 0.64, suggesting enhanced risk tiering ability. The company has upgraded data mining capabilities as well, using video and multimodal inputs for a diverse feature representation. Furthermore, Qifu Technology’s user profiling agent performs consistency checks on user features with more than 95% accuracy, supporting differentiated credit lines and pricing based on user profiles.

Financially speaking, the AI-Plus strategy is yielding tangible improvements during the first quarter of 2025. There has been a 15.8% year-over-year rise in loan volume with its C2M2 metric, measuring delinquency rates after a 30-day collection, largely stable at 0.6%. Enhancements in underwriting efficiency and robust asset quality resulted in a constant decline in funding costs by an additional 30 basis points.

QFIN also witnessed 25% year-over-year growth in Asset-Backed Securities issuance. The AI-Plus credit strategy was particularly successful at raising new credit line users by 6% year over year and a 41% surge in new borrowers. All in all, the strategy appears to have a strong impact on operational efficiency, risk management and long-term sustainable growth for the company.

QFIN’s Price Performance, Valuation & Estimates

QFIN stock has skyrocketed 115.9% in the past year, significantly outperforming Parsons PSN, Jamf JAMF, and the industry as a whole. The industry gained 50.9%, while PSN and JAMF declined 8.8% and 33.5%, respectively.

1-Year Price Performance

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From a valuation standpoint, QFIN trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 5.58, lower than Parsons’ 19.05, Jamf’s 11.79, and the industry’s 24.34.

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Qifu Technology carries a Value Score of A, while Parsons and Jamf carry C and D, respectively.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for QFIN’s earnings for 2025 has risen 2.3% over the past 30 days.

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Qifu Technology stock currently has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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