At noon on October 12, 2026, a police bulletin was posted.
A criminal investigation has been opened in accordance with the law into suspected illegal and criminal activities by companies affiliated with CreditEase; the actual controller, surnamed Tang, male, 53 years old, and surnamed Zhao, female, 51 years old, along with multiple other criminal suspects, have been subjected to criminal coercive measures in accordance with the law.
The bulletin did not contain the two characters "Tang Ning." But everyone knew who Tang was. Born in 1973 in Tianjin, he would be exactly 53 years old in 2026.
The night before, an "Apology Letter to Quasi-Fixed-Income Product Clients" had already been pushed via the two apps Ruicheng and Yiren Youxuan to quasi-fixed-income investors in a targeted manner. The letter stated that on May 22, 2026, the group's research decision was to fully halt redemption of quasi-fixed-income products; however, multiple businesses of the group suffered relatively large losses, the value of market-based disposal assets was low, and there was a lack of effective funding sources, resulting in substantive default on quasi-fixed-income products; after entrusting a third party with asset verification and financial due diligence, "it was preliminarily found that CreditEase Group may be insolvent, with a relatively large debt repayment gap."
A company once called "the flagship enterprise of China's inclusive finance and wealth management," within twenty-four hours, first admitted it might already be insolvent, and then was placed under police investigation.
From 2006 to 2026, a full twenty years.
One Hundred Students and a Blackboard
The story must go back even earlier.
In 1998, New Oriental was just starting out. Yu Minhong brought in the first batch of college student teachers, one of whom was a Tianjin native who had come out of Peking University's mathematics department, named Tang Ning. He and Yu Minhong were alumni. Tang Ning was also one of the first batch of college student teachers hired by Yu Minhong.
It is said that the two had a friendly meeting and conversed happily, with mutual intentions to cooperate.
And Tang Ning's business empire began in the education industry. That blackboard was actually the true starting point of the entire story.
In 2002, Han Shaoyun, deputy chief engineer of AsiaInfo's software business unit, came out to start a business and created an IT vocational education company called Tarena Technology. Tang Ning was an early investor in it. At that time, he had just returned from Wall Street two years earlier and was serving as director of strategic investment and mergers and acquisitions at AsiaInfo.
He saw a very concrete problem in Tarena's students: they wanted to learn and could pass the exams, but could not pay tuition in a lump sum.
He first tried to match banks to lend to this group of students. The banks would not look at it. The reason was simple: these people had no credit records, no collateral, and no stable cash flow.
So Tang Ning lent them money himself. He lent it one transaction at a time, and in the end all the money was repaid.
This experience later gave rise to the advertising slogan in 2005 for Tarena: "Employment first, payment later." It also sparked an idea in Tang Ning's mind. In 2006, he positioned CreditEase's business as targeting "people with educational needs but without the ability to pay tuition in a lump sum."
He repeated this story many times afterward. Twenty years later, all of CreditEase's external narratives are built on these two points: the prototype of a business model and a moral starting point.
What kind of team a person builds says more about who they are than what they say themselves.
Tang Ning's first company was China Growth Capital (Hwachuang Capital). Wu Haiyan, who later became a managing partner, was the third employee at Hwachuang in 2006, after Tang Ning and Zeng Feng. Years later, a friend of hers, Zhang Xiangdong, founder of 700Bike, wrote the following in an email to a reporter from China Entrepreneur magazine. Although it was about Wu Haiyan, it reveals Tang Ning's taste in selecting and mentoring people back then:
"She sent me written records multiple times, writing about her insights from reading books or meeting smart people, organized in long passages. For someone who has already achieved so much to do this regularly—what kind of person do you think she is?"
As for Tang Ning's own way of talking with people, in 2017, Wu Haiyan was publicly recalled by Xu Zheng, founder of MissFresh, at a forum about their first meeting. Xu Zheng said the two arranged to meet at Starbucks, as a casual remark. Wu Haiyan corrected him on the spot: "It wasn't Starbucks, it was at the Hwachuang office." Xu Zheng amended: "Then perhaps I bought you a Starbucks and brought it to the office." Wu Haiyan corrected him again: "The first time we met, you didn't know I would drink Starbucks, so you didn't bring one."
This kind of meticulousness is recognized within Hwachuang as the "Wu Haiyan style." And the source of this style comes from her mentor back then, Tang Ning.
CreditEase was the first project incubated by Hwachuang.
In 2006, Tang Ning founded CreditEase in Beijing. One of China's earliest P2P companies.
Empire: From $5 million to the bell at the New York Stock Exchange
In 2010, Tang Ning personally injected 3 million yuan to gain actual control of "CreditEase Huimin." Together with two others, Zhao Mei (1.05 million) and Tian Yan (950,000), they pledged all shares of "Huimin" to "Puxin Hengye," a company wholly owned and established in China by CreditEase Holdings (Hong Kong).
The money followed soon after.
Series A, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) $5 million. Series B, in May 2011, KPCB joined with IDG Capital and Morgan Stanley Asia Investment Fund, totaling $30 million.
With over $30 million in funding, Tang Ning began building his empire. Puxin Hengye (group management and online P2P), Beijing CreditEase Zhizheng Credit Assessment (private credit reporting, October 2010), CreditEase Pucheng and CreditEase Puhui (offline loan consulting), CreditEase Zhuoyue Wealth Investment Management (offline wealth management clients), Fu'an Yida (third-party payment, February 2011), CreditEase Huicong Financial Leasing.
Simply put, a private bank.
In 2012, Yiren Digital went live. On December 18, 2015, Yiren Digital was listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol YRD.
The initial public offering was 7.5 million American Depositary Shares, priced at $10 per share, raising $75 million. The underwriters had 30 days to issue up to an additional 1.125 million shares for over-allotment. On the day of listing, Tang Ning said in New York: "In terms of information disclosure and corporate governance, the NYSE has very high requirements for internet finance and P2P platforms. The company hopes to set an industry benchmark by listing on the NYSE."
From a few dozen students to hundreds of thousands of strangers, "China's No. 1 P2P Stock." He had claimed that title.
At its peak, the empire's scale was as follows.
In April 2014, Tang Ning disclosed in an internal open letter, "Of CreditEase Wealth's nearly RMB 50 billion in annual asset allocation, only 13.1% of funds were allocated to various real estate projects." Four years later, in June 2018, he told 21st Century Business Herald that CreditEase Wealth had cumulatively managed hundreds of billions of RMB in assets for clients, with over RMB 100 billion in assets under management. That same year, its private equity fund of funds managed over RMB 20 billion in capital, had invested in over 200 funds, covering more than 4,000 companies, and indirectly invested in over 100 listed and New Third Board companies and over 40 unicorns.
Offices were established in Hong Kong, Singapore, Israel, Europe, and North America. The Singapore entity CreditEase Asset Management (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. holds a Capital Markets Services license (fund management) from MAS; Hong Kong's CreditEase Wealth Management (HK) Limited holds SFC Type 4 (advising on securities) and Type 9 (asset management) licenses.
At his peak, he once said: "Development and regulation have always accompanied the growth of the fintech industry, and self-discipline alone is not enough for enterprises — there must be mutual discipline and external discipline. In this process, it is also necessary to protect the rights and interests of individual investors, help them find suitable projects, and even tailor-made investment portfolios."
This was the empire at its best. Four years later, he would push an apology letter to these investors in the app.
In fact, the first crack in the empire appeared a year and a half before the IPO.
The first crack: 2014's 800 million
In 2014, Hong Kong local media reported: problems with an 800 million yuan loan for CreditEase's real estate project in Northeast China. The details that subsequently emerged were even uglier. The bad debt company was described as "a shell company to begin with," the loan entity had already faced multiple lawsuits, and the collateral was unfinished buildings in cities below the fourth tier in Northeast China. In other words, even if CreditEase applied for asset preservation, it would be difficult to recover the full amount owed.
Tang Ning sent an internal open letter, saying the project was operating normally and that the party that exposed the bad debt turmoil "constitutes unethical and non-compliant competitive behavior and business conduct."
But the trouble was not limited to the Northeast. Some media found that a commercial real estate project in Hangzhou that had matured that month also carried potential overdue or bad debt risk. Positioned as a high-end office building, the project broke ground in November 2011 and was scheduled for delivery in July 2014, but at that time it still had not been pre-sold. The project prospectus showed that CreditEase held 600 million yuan in land and construction in progress, as well as 51% equity in the project company as collateral.
CreditEase got through this hurdle. The method was to tell a bigger and farther-reaching story over the next two years.
In April 2015, Tang Ning, holding a cracked iPhone 4s, flew to the United States to attend the LendIt Summit, the highest-spec conference in the global P2P industry, where he announced CreditEase's globalization strategy: first, to cooperate with top international asset management institutions such as Wellington and Oaktree to help clients with global asset allocation; second, to export technology to the world, and at that time it was in talks with India's top three microfinance companies.
Eight months later, Yiren Digital rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
Autumn 2018
At the turn of summer and autumn in 2018, China's P2P industry suffered the largest wave of collapses in its history.
Regulators issued the "108 Articles," and comprehensive compliance inspections were rolled out. Platforms shut down one after another, and lenders lined up at headquarters to demand their money back. The industry atmosphere that year, in the words of the media at the time, was a "battle royale."
At this very moment, Tang Ning paid a visit to Caixin.
He first pointed the finger at the media. He said some non-professional media outlets had amplified panic.
Then he offered a methodology. He argued that markets and investors should focus on the platform's "outstanding balance" rather than being intimidated by the exaggerated "cumulative total transaction volume." His exact words were that to assess the risk of an industry, one should look at the "outstanding balance" rather than "total transaction volume," and that panic often stems from unprofessional interpretation of numbers.
His judgment on the industry. He said the current regulatory storm was an inevitable process of industry self-purification, and that the exit of a large number of small and medium-sized subpar platforms lacking risk control capabilities and illegally operating pools would free up space for compliant leading institutions. He called this the industry moving from "bad money driving out good money" to "good money driving out bad money."
He added one more line, saying the industry's period of pain was not the end of online lending, but the beginning of "good money driving out bad money," and that "compliance and reverence for risk are the true foundation of fintech."
There was a premise embedded in that statement: he believed he was that good money.
A year later, in November 2019, CreditEase Huimin announced it would no longer add new lending and borrowing business, and the existing online lending business would be operated uniformly by the Yiren Digital platform.
Two more years after that, the industry was cleared out entirely.
And that slogan of "from bad money driving out good money, to good money driving out bad money" was the last thing he said at the table.
From 2018 to 2020, the nationwide P2P industry was thoroughly cleaned up and rectified. CreditEase shut down its online lending business and split the group into two parts: one was the loan facilitation business centered on "Yixianghua," which was placed into a listed company; the other was CreditEase Wealth, which handled wealth management. In October 2020, CreditEase Wealth launched a new brand, "Ruicheng Family Office."
The Shape of Money: Channels, Fee Engines, Then Numbers
To understand why CreditEase could still keep selling "quasi-fixed-income" products five years after the P2P clearance, you first have to understand one term: non-standard.
Non-standardized credit assets. In plain terms: credit claims not publicly traded on the interbank market or exchanges, such as an auto loan, a consumer loan, or a small and micro business loan. It has no public price, no active trading, and poor liquidity, but its yield is higher than standardized products. Quasi-fixed-income products are made by packaging this kind of asset into something that looks like a bond and selling it.
It looks like a bond, but the underlying asset is not a debtor you can look up, but an asset pool. And CreditEase never lets anyone see what is actually in the asset pool. The industry saying is very direct: "CreditEase's model is to sell wealth management products with the left hand to raise money, and with the right hand lend the money to its own loan facilitation platform to engage in usury, earning the interest spread."
The first component was the issuance channel. It was dismantled in 2025.
In 2023, the central bank listed the prudent resolution of gold exchange risks as a key task in its "China Financial Stability Report." By September 2025, the CSRC announced that all 27 gold exchanges that should be closed had their qualifications revoked, and over a hundred "pseudo gold exchanges" were also cleaned up.
But CreditEase's quasi-fixed-income products are still being sold. It has switched to a new shell: debt auction. According to multiple contract documents provided by investors, CreditEase has fully switched to a debt auction model, using "debt bidding" as a shell to continue issuing quasi-fixed-income products with fixed terms and fixed returns.
This is a classic sample in pattern analysis: when regulators plug one hole, the channel migrates to another.
The second component is the fee engine. It was also dismantled in 2025.
In April 2025, the National Financial Regulatory Administration issued new rules on loan facilitation (2025 No. 15), requiring commercial banks to implement a list-based management system for platform operating institutions and prohibiting cooperation with institutions outside the list; it also explicitly stipulated that platform operating institutions may not charge borrowers interest or fees in any form, and credit enhancement service institutions may not disguise rate increases through consulting fees, advisory fees, or other means.
Then came the numbers.
Yiren Digital's 2025 annual report: full-year net profit plunged from RMB 1.582 billion in 2024 to RMB 40.5 million, a year-on-year drop of 97.4%. In the fourth quarter alone, net loss was RMB 882 million, compared with a profit of RMB 331.4 million in the same period of 2024. Fourth-quarter facilitated loans fell 22% year-on-year and 40% quarter-on-quarter; by the end of 2025, the outstanding loan balance had dropped to RMB 28.6 billion.
In March 2026, the National Financial Regulatory Administration and the central bank jointly issued the "Provisions on Transparent Comprehensive Financing Costs for Personal Loan Business," requiring all lending institutions to list interest, installment fees, and credit enhancement service fees in a single disclosure table, with "items not disclosed may not be charged." In the same month, CreditEase's "Yixianghua" was summoned for talks by the National Financial Regulatory Administration, among five leading loan facilitation platforms named, with issues including high comprehensive funding costs, unclear fee disclosure, induced borrowing, and non-compliant debt collection.
One month later, on April 21, the central bank and seven other departments issued the "Measures for the Administration of Online Marketing of Financial Products," prohibiting "nesting-doll-style" multi-layer distribution and imperceptible traffic diversion.
By May 2026, every component of that model had been removed: the issuance channel was gone, the fee engine was gone, and the funding willing to take orders was gone. But the underlying money had long since been lent out.
Spring 2026: From "System Upgrade" to "A Difficult Decision"
The first to sense something was wrong weren't the media, but the clients who were waiting for their repayments every month.
From late April to early May 2026, investors clearly felt that the pace of repayments had become sluggish, no longer "instant." Facing a barrage of inquiries, CreditEase uniformly explained that it was due to account system upgrades and settlement channel adjustments, while sending out explanatory screenshots to clients in bulk.
This explanation had a clever aspect: repayments were still completed within the T+5 compliance period. In other words, from a contractual standpoint, CreditEase had not yet defaulted. It simply no longer credited funds on the same day as before.
On May 12, a more concrete signal emerged. CreditEase's platform "Talicai" notified that it would early-terminate the product "Anyiying" for accounts under 50,000 yuan, promising repayment within 5 business days after termination.
Then it broke its promise. Some investors posted screenshots: a 20,000-yuan "Anyiying—Phase 6" product with an annualized rate of 4.4%, maturing on May 12, 2026, had its status stuck at "repayment in progress."
On May 18, an investor who had invested for 14 years discovered that the returns she was supposed to receive that day had not arrived on time.
On May 22, CreditEase announced the launch of a "benign liquidation" of its fixed-income-like products, fully suspending principal and interest repayments. The operating entity is Ruicheng Family Information Consulting (Beijing) Co., Ltd. Multiple platforms were involved, including Yiren Youxuan, Tomi, and Ruicheng.
On the same day, an open letter signed "CreditEase Founder and CEO Tang Ning," dated May 22, began circulating in investors' WeChat groups. The letter said: "We have made a difficult decision to suspend principal and return payments for our credit products."
Users felt the sky was falling.
In the "Comprehensive Wealth Management" group of her financial app, a long post was published at 9:53 AM on May 26, and it quickly garnered 101 replies. The poster, named aka13, wrote:
"Basically all of Aka's past savings are in there. I didn't sleep well all night last night."
Someone replied below:
"Most of my savings are in there too. I lost two jin in one day yesterday, and my heart rate was 110 this morning."
Another person wrote just one line:
"The elderly's and my own pension are both in there."
During the same period, a flood of new posts appeared on Black Cat Complaints and Sina Woodpecker Complaints: "CreditEase Wealth / Yiren Youxuan / Anyiying (Talicai) wealth management products refuse to repay upon maturity, suspected breach of contract"; "Yiren Wealth (Yiren Dai) related [Yiren Youxuan] return my 400,000+ yuan of hard-earned money"; "Demand that CreditEase Wealth repay principal and interest on matured products."
An investor named Li Li told "Daily Economic News" something sharper than any financial analysis:
"After it happened, none of us knew. In the end, we only found out through the news."
"Many of us had our entire life savings in there. Without any advance notice, payments suddenly stopped, with no communication and no explanation at all."
On September 17, under that post from May 26, someone came back and left a comment:
"The orderly exit mentioned on 5.22, now it's September 17, almost 4 months have passed, and there's still no follow-up. Her Wealth, CreditEase Wealth, so disappointing!"
That post had been hanging there for 114 days from the day it was published to that day.
In 2018, a reporter asked him, "Is it still possible for the company to die at today's scale? If so, what do you think it would most likely die from?"
Tang Ning's answer was:
"The head of any company and its team must have an extremely strong sense of crisis. Only paranoids survive. As work related to finance, it requires even more prudence. CreditEase's risk awareness and crisis awareness are especially strong, and its risk prevention education for clients is also consistent throughout."
Eight years later today, this Q&A is almost a footnote written in advance for the ending.
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