(Yicai Global) Sept. 25 -- Ant Group’s online lender MYBank is using satellites to monitor farmers' assets in remote rural regions in order to reduce the difficulty of granting loans in these hard-to-reach areas, Yicai Global learned at the INCLUSION Fintech Conference in Shanghai today.

Satellites can make crops, farmers' most valuable assets, clearly visible, said Wang Jian, developer of the technology and chief algorithmic expert on rural finance at MYBank, also known as Zhejiang E-Commerce Bank.

They can measure the size of the farm and identify which crops, such as rice, corn, wheat, peanut and tobacco, are planted on it.

All the farmer needs to do is walk around his farm with a smartphone or mark the land on the mobile payment app Alipay, and the bank can carry out its assessment via satellite with an accuracy rate of over 93 percent, Wang said.

An algorithm estimates the value of a farmer's future harvest based on industry prices, climate projections and through the use of dozens of risk control models, said Rural Finance Risk Director Gu Xinxin. In this way, the bank can loan funds with peace of mind and offer repayment plans, he added.

The technology is able to monitor crop growth in real time and analyze farmers' immediate demand for funds in order to achieve accurate risk control, Gu said. The data is updated every five days.

It is not feasible for bank employees to survey each farm personally due to their remote and dispersed locations, Gu added. The average cost of such a visit for one loan can top CNY1,000 (USD147). Land registration documents are sufficient to verify the farmer's ownership of the land.

The service has already assisted over 50,000 farmers in 690 counties despite having just started. Liu Yingfeng, who has planted 130 hectares of rice in southeastern Jiangxi province, was able to leverage CNY350,000 (USD51,283) in just a few minutes with the help of the technology. Rice transplanting, top dressing and harvesting require huge funds, she said.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor