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On October 12, the Chaoyang District Public Security Bureau in Beijing issued a police notice stating that Tang, Zhao, and several other suspects — including the actual controller of CreditEase — have been subjected to criminal coercive measures in accordance with the law. Currently, investors are registering their cases through the three methods listed in the police notice. "It has been nearly ten years since I first purchased products, the app has gone through several iterations, and many documents can no longer be found," one investor said.
From its founding in 2006 to becoming the subject of a criminal investigation in 2026, a full 20 years have passed. During these two decades, CreditEase seized the era's dividends in consumer credit, small and micro enterprise financing, and fintech innovation, but was ultimately consumed by the structural contradictions of its own business model.
On October 12, shares of the US-listed Yiren Digital (NYSE: YRD) plunged sharply after the market opened, closing at $0.56 per share, a single-day drop of 44.05%. The market has already voted with its feet.
Tang Ning's Inclusive Finance Experiment and the "Debt Transfer" Controversy
The "Tang" mentioned in the police notice is none other than Tang Ning. In fact, news that Tang Ning and other senior executives had been taken away had already been "spreading like wildfire" in various CreditEase investor groups the day before. In the eyes of many investors, the apology letter titled "Letter of Apology to Clients of Fixed-Income-Like Products" issued on the evening of October 11 was sent out under precisely such intense pressure.
According to his public resume, CreditEase founder Tang Ning has an impressive educational and early career background. He studied in the Mathematics Department at Peking University in his early years, then went to the United States to study economics, and later worked at an investment bank on Wall Street. While in the US, he was exposed to the "Grameen model" of small, uncollateralized loans targeting impoverished populations, and even made a special trip to Bangladesh for field study. After returning to China, Tang Ning became an angel investor, investing in several education and training institutions.
At the time, he discovered that some trainees wanted to attend training but could not afford tens of thousands of yuan in tuition fees, and hoped to pay while training or pay after training. Tang Ning tried to seek support from financial institutions, but no bank was willing to lend to this group. So Tang Ning decided to lend his own money to 100 trainees, and surprisingly, these trainees all eventually repaid. According to past reports, this trial run gave Tang Ning tremendous confidence and was also the starting point for CreditEase's journey toward inclusive finance.
In May 2006, CreditEase was established, providing personal credit consulting and management services to education and training institutions. Its products mainly included business-assistance loans, new-salary loans, study-credit loans, agricultural loans, and education loans, targeting small and micro business owners, salaried workers, students, public welfare organizations, and educational institutions respectively. At the time, the most frequently mentioned industry practice was the "offline debt transfer model" pioneered by CreditEase.
According to public reports, the core transaction structure of this model was that Tang Ning or other CreditEase executives would advance loans to users who needed to borrow, then split and combine the resulting creditor's rights, package them into fixed-income-like products, and sell them to wealth management clients through a sales team. Since its inception, the "offline debt transfer model" has been continuously questioned in the industry, with the main points of controversy being maturity mismatch and capital pools.
Tang Ning responded on multiple occasions, stating that there was no maturity mismatch or any promise of returns or principal. Investors were simply purchasing an already-generated creditor's right from a lender, and the duration of the creditor's right determined the duration of the purchase, with each payment fully matched one-to-one. There was also no capital pool, so investors often had to wait for suitable borrowers.
According to insiders at CreditEase, as of 2011, Tang Ning's personal lending balance had reached at least over 2 billion yuan. He was jokingly referred to as the individual with the largest cumulative lending volume at the time. In 2012, CreditEase launched an online lending platform — Yirendai — forming a dual P2P structure with offline CreditEase and online Yirendai.
At that time, the P2P industry entered a period of wild growth, with the number of platforms surging and peaking in 2015. In December 2015, Yirendai successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange, becoming China's first P2P stock. Eleven years later, on May 22, 2026, CreditEase announced a complete halt to redemption of fixed-income-like products, aiming to fairly repay all investors through orderly wind-down, and expected to announce a wind-down plan within 4 to 6 weeks and sign agreements with clients one by one. That wait lasted over four months, and the final response was "possibly insolvent."
The Last Gasp
In fact, behind the fanfare of Yirendai's NYSE listing, a wave of P2P wind-downs was already roaring in. CreditEase also made related adjustments to its P2P business. In November 2019, the company announced that its P2P platform CreditEase Huimin would no longer add new lending and borrowing business, and its existing online lending business would be operated and managed uniformly by the Yirendai platform. In July 2019, Yirendai was renamed "Yiren Digital." In 2024, it was renamed again to Yiren Digital (NYSE: YRD).
Yiren Digital (NYSE: YRD) has two major business segments: one is the internet loan facilitation business "Yixianghua," and the other is Hexu Insurance Brokerage. After CreditEase announced its orderly wind-down in May of this year, Yiren Digital (NYSE: YRD) has been the loan facilitation base that investors have pinned high hopes on for repayment. However, Yiren Digital (NYSE: YRD) itself is also in a channel of declining performance. The company's second-quarter report shows that total net revenue for the second quarter of 2026 was 890 million yuan, down 3% quarter-over-quarter and down 46% year-over-year.
On May 25, after the orderly wind-down news was released, Yiren Digital (NYSE: YRD) urgently issued a statement emphasizing that as an independently operated listed company entity, it belongs to an independent business system separate from other business segments, with completely isolated operations and management, operating independently without mutual influence, and that Yiren Digital (NYSE: YRD) has not conducted any wealth management-related business.
However, intriguingly, the aforementioned "Letter of Apology to Clients of Fixed-Income-Like Products," when expressing that it would further ascertain the bottom line of assets and liabilities, also mentioned "continuing to steadily carry out loan facilitation business and other licensed businesses, making the greatest effort to accelerate the collection of non-performing debts, and accelerating the promotion of converting valuable assets into cash."
Mr. Zhao (pseudonym), a former mid-to-senior level wealth advisor at CreditEase, told reporters, "Before this, the CreditEase Group had always tried to distance its licensed businesses from its wealth business. This time, proactively mentioning it is a positive signal."
On the evening of October 12, Yiren Digital (NYSE: YRD) issued another statement, once again emphasizing its status as an "independently operated listed company entity," while also stating that the reasons for involvement in this incident have not been found to be directly related to Yiren Digital (NYSE: YRD)'s business.
Success and Failure Both Stem from "Fixed-Income-Like" Products
Compared to the listed platform Yiren Digital (NYSE: YRD), which focuses on loan facilitation, what is more worth examining is the wealth management business that CreditEase has always retained. CreditEase Wealth has branches in nearly 40 cities and offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Israel, North America, and other locations, and has obtained multiple licenses and operating qualifications including private equity funds, insurance agency, and insurance brokerage, as well as financial licenses granted by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission and the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
In the early years, the underlying assets of wealth management were mainly P2P, that is, debt transfers — lending on one hand and transferring creditor's rights on the other. After the P2P business was terminated, CreditEase still had a large number of high-net-worth clients and existing funds in hand. This portion of the business was not wound down but instead shifted its focus to fixed-income-like non-standard products, with the "Ruicheng" brand beginning to take on the sale of fixed-income-like products to high-end clients. These fixed-income-like products were mainly issued through local financial asset exchanges and property rights exchanges. "Fixed interest rates and high yields" were the main reasons many investors chose CreditEase.
"When I was still at CreditEase, the annualized yield on fixed-income-like products ranged from 6% to 8%, with terms ranging from 3 months to 2 years. This yield could be said to be very attractive," Mr. Zhao said. He revealed that CreditEase's "fixed-income-like" business peaked around 2019, when it was estimated at nearly 150 billion yuan. In recent years, CreditEase has been shrinking its fixed-income-like business. "Currently, by my estimate, it should be around 40 billion to 50 billion yuan," he said.
And the underlying assets of this portion of fixed-income-like products have always been a mystery. As early as 2021, a public report once tore open the "tip of the iceberg" of CreditEase's fixed-income-like underlying assets. The report pointed out that the relevant parties behind the underlying assets of CreditEase Wealth's fixed-income-like products were actually composed of the same group of people and companies closely related to CreditEase with close affiliated relationships. At the time, these products were all listed through local property rights exchanges, where the listing party (i.e., the financing party) and the delisting party (as the investor's representative receiving the creditor's rights) should have been counterparties, but after penetrating the business registration data, they were all insiders.
The report also pointed out that CreditEase Wealth was suspected of splitting labels, setting minimum transaction units of 100,000 and 1 million yuan in fixed-income products and trading in integer multiples; the certification of qualified investors was merely a formality. Mr. Zhao stated that the underlying assets of fixed-income-like products included small loan facilitation businesses such as vehicle mortgage loans, small credit loans evolved from the P2P model, as well as bank loan facilitation and equipment financial leasing. However, between 2023 and 2025, local property rights exchanges and financial asset exchanges were all cleaned up and issuance channels were closed, but CreditEase's fixed-income-like business continued, albeit in the form of "debt auctions."
How Will the Case Be Characterized?
In addition to fixed-income-like products, CreditEase's original wealth management landscape also included fund of funds, sunshine private equity, and overseas insurance allocation. According to official CreditEase data, as of April 2018, CreditEase Wealth's private equity fund of funds managed over 20 billion yuan in private equity assets, with cumulative investments in more than 200 domestic and international funds, covering over 4,000 enterprises. Tang Ning once touted that fund of funds was the best choice for high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth individuals for long-term investment and alternative asset investment. In 2020, CreditEase Wealth also launched the Ruicheng Family Office brand.
In addition, CreditEase holds an insurance brokerage license in Hong Kong, conducting business through "Decheng Insurance Agency Limited." After CreditEase was placed under criminal investigation, many investors holding Hong Kong insurance policies posted online asking whether they needed to register their cases. A person familiar with the matter said that Hong Kong insurance policies themselves are safe because the products mainly come from insurance companies, but as for CreditEase as the channel party, "the person who served you at the time most likely can no longer be reached."
As the "edifice collapses," how the case will be characterized has become the focus of investors' greatest attention. Lawyer Zhou Baojin of Beijing Jintou Law Firm told reporters that the possible final charges are concentrated on the crime of illegally absorbing public deposits and the crime of fund-raising fraud. Among them, the crime of illegally absorbing public deposits does not require the premise of "purpose of illegal possession," but must simultaneously satisfy four statutory constituent elements: illegality, openness, inducement, and sociality. The crime of fund-raising fraud is an aggravated form of illegal fund-raising, and its establishment requires, on the basis of conforming to the above characteristics of illegal fund-raising behavior, simultaneously possessing two core elements: first, objectively using fraudulent methods, and second, subjectively having the purpose of illegal possession.
Zhou Baojin said that the core distinction between the two crimes is not simply "where the money went" and "what the person intended to do," but a comprehensive judgment of the nature of objective behavior and the content of subjective intent: the destination of funds is the core factual basis for judging the purpose of illegal possession, but it is also necessary to combine the authenticity of underlying assets, the degree of matching between fund use and fundraising scale, the true reasons for inability to redeem, and the actor's attitude toward disposing of funds, ultimately determining whether the actor has the subjective intent to "illegally appropriate the raised funds for oneself and refuse to return them."