E-commerce behemoth's fintech platform unveils brand upgrade

JD Finance, a leading fintech platform in China, announced the upgrade of its brand on Tuesday with the unveiling of JD Digits, indicating the company's drive towards integrating advanced digital technologies into more sectors.

Apart from boosting the company's strength in fintech, JD Digits will set out to target four other fields - urban computing, agriculture, campus services and digital marketing.

"While fintech continues to be the core business of the company, we are intensely developing digital technology to serve a wider range of industries. The data-related business remains our primary focus," Chen Shengqiang, CEO of JD Digits, said at the 2018 JD Discovery Conference in Beijing on Tuesday.

As a new and fast-developing industry, digital technology - which integrates industries with cutting-edge technologies - can promote industries' development through the internet, digitalization and intellectualization, in order to ultimately reduce production costs, improve user experience, increase industrial revenues, and upgrade industrial models, according to Chen.

JD Digits also announced the launch of the JD agriculture and husbandry academic research program.

In the field of agriculture, JD Digits is applying artificial intelligence, internet of things, robotics and computing to digitalize traditional agriculture practices, helping to reduce farmers' costs while improving agricultural efficiency.

This solution has been successfully introduced to the pig-breeding industry, where it has practically proven to decrease costs by 30 to 50 percent.

JD Digits also provides an urban computing platform to support the construction of smart cities with customized intelligence solutions to benefit the environment, transportation, energy consumption, healthcare and other sectors.

For example, through the use of AI technology, the urban computing platform can optimize a city's emergency response stations, helping emergency responders and ambulances to cut the time they are stuck in traffic by up to 30 percent, which means more lives can be saved. The platform can also improve the efficiency of a city's energy consumption by 0.5 percent, effectively reducing costs by billions of dollars annually.

Over the past five years, JD Digits has ramped up efforts in terms of its data processing capabilities and the implementation of advanced data technology, with artificial intelligence and internet of things among the company's core strengths.