The Second "Credit Scoring and Rating Conference" successfully ended on 23 October 2022 and was hosted by the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC). The conference was co-organised by the Faculty of Science and Engineering, UNNC, Nottingham University Business School, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics (SWUFE), and the University of Edinburgh.

The Conference theme was "Green Finance and Smart Credit" and around 100 academics, scholars and industry practitioner participated online and onsite, with delegates from China, USA, Europe, India, Australia and South Africa. They discussed the development of green finance and smart credit under the impact of the epidemic, and shared relevant research results such as credit scoring.

The conference successfully invited four keynote speakers—Professor Shouyang Wang, Distinguished Professors from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Professor Guotai Chi of the School of Economics and Management, Dalian University of Technology, Professor Bart Baesens from the KU Leuven in Belgium, and Raymond Anderson, founder of Rennes Risk Consulting, to deliver keynote speeches. The conference was further divided into 18 parallel sessions, and topics included: financial distress, machine learning, green finance, risk modelling, and etc.

Professor Tao Wu, Vice Provost for China Beacons Institute, Dean of Faculty of Science and Engineering, delivered a speech at the opening ceremony and welcomed all the attendees. Professor Wu pointed out the important value of this conference and how financial technologies like data analysis, big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and text analysis have empowered modern banking and smart decisions.

Dr Anthony Bellotti and Dr Tianxiang Cui from the Department of Computer Science, Professor Xiuping Hua and Dr Hang Zhou from the Nottingham University Business School have deeply participated in organising the conference. Dr Anthony Bellotti and Dr Tianxiang Cui chaired two parallel sessions on the topic of Machine learning and the impact of Covid-19 respectively.

Dr Anthony Bellotti, one of the leading members of the conference, is Associate Professor in Computer Science and has more than 16 years of experience studying statistical models and machine learning in consumer credit risk. In 2021, Dr Bellotti has led a team working collaboratively on the credit risk assessment and decision support for smart finance in Ningbo. He also shared his research and knowledge exchange experiences with local authorities. Dr Tianxiang Cui, Assistant Professor in Computer Science also has expertise in computational Finance and computational intelligence.

The rise of international tensions and the pandemic has brought uncertainties to the world economy. Experts and scholars from banking, corporate finance, consumer finance, bond and credit derivatives markets, financial technology, credit reporting and rating agencies gathered together to work on this issues, bringing their research and practices and finding solutions to credit scoring, credit rating and credit asset risk management.

The University of Nottingham Ningbo China is a fast-growing hub for excellence in research and knowledge exchange and drives local economic development and contribute to the sustainable development of the world economy. Researchers at UNNC are contributing to state-of-the-art research in the topics of green finance and application of machine learning in finance, and will continue to be at the forefront of these fields.