JD.com, China's largest online direct sales company, and Zestfinance, a U.S.-based financial technology company, announced on Friday to launch a joint venture to support the development of consumer credit in China.

The joint venture, called JD-ZestFinance Gaia, will combine JD.com's database of more than 100 million active customers with ZestFinance's machine learning underwriting technology to provide credit risk evaluation services to companies in China.

Lenders in China lack the data typically used in established markets to determine creditworthiness as Chinese consumers often have little-to-no credit history, creating a bottleneck for the development of China's consumption loans, said Yao Naisheng, vice president of JD Finance.

As the first customer of the joint venture, JD.com will use the services to provide new credit offerings to consumers.

China's consumer credit market will maintain a 20 percent annual growth between 2014 and 2017. The market will be worth 27 trillion yuan (4.4 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2017, according to iResearch, a leading Chinese research firm. Endit

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