Our culture also encourages being open-minded and embracing changes and innovations. Inspired by such culture, an AI Hackathon event has been successfully organized to pursue new avenues of AI development. Encouragingly, a number of projects and initiatives from the event are undergoing continuous development and some of them have entered the internal testing phase during this quarter. Moving forward, we will remain committed to our vision of becoming everyone’s financial partner and foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation. Our unwavering dedication to being user-oriented will drive us to consistently deliver services and products that deeply connect with our customers. Before I turn the call to Oscar, let me briefly discuss the macro environment and our business outlook.
The Chinese government has taken proactive steps to address the current economic conditions characterized by lingering uncertainties and the need to strengthen the momentum of the recovery. The continuous implementation of stabilization policies has yielded encouraging results, driving a recent acceleration in growth. We believe that the government’s recent measures to stimulate demand and stabilize the property market will act as positive catalysts, injecting new energy into the ongoing economic recovery. Furthermore, we are cognizant of the immense opportunities that come with the advancement of AI, and will target to develop flexible and low-coupling AI solutions with comprehensive coverage in AI product architecture. We will continue to execute on our strategy for driving the digital transformation of the financial and other industries, empowering our ecosystem partners with digital technology and artificial intelligence.
I will now hand over to our CFO, Oscar Chen to run through our financials.
Oscar Chen: Thank you, David, as well as David’s AI system, who did a great job just now. Hello everyone. As David mentioned earlier, we have made progress in carefully navigating this challenging environment. During the third quarter, we continue to diversify our business mix, improve our operational efficiency and optimize our cost structure. In the third quarter, the total recommendation service revenues decreased by 9.6% year-over-year to RMB191.2 million. Revenues from loan recommendation service maintained the strong growth momentum, increasing by 25.3% year-over-year in the third quarter, mainly driven by a 48% year-over-year increase in the number of loan applications to approximately $7.4 million. Revenues from credit card recommendation services decreased by 31.8% year-over-year, mainly due to that certain bank credit card issuers tightened their credit policy and lowered their marketing budgets since the second quarter.
Credit card volume decreased by 27.3% year-over-year to approximately RMB0.8 million. Revenues from our big data and system-based risk management services decreased by 24.4% to RMB18.9 million in the third quarter of 2023 from RMB25 million in the same period 2022. The decrease was mainly due to the deconsolidation of a subsidiary and to a less extent a gradual shift of our business model of database risk management services towards the corporation with the licensed – credit reporting agencies. Revenues from marketing and other services increased by 41.3% to RMB45.5 million in the third quarter of 2023 from RMB32.2 million in the same period of 2022, primarily due to the growth of our insurance brokerage services and other new businesses. This is a strong testament to our success in applying our advanced AI technologies and strong digital marketing capabilities beyond the financial sector into adjacent categories.
Let me now move on to costs and expenses. Cost of promotion and acquisition decreased by 7% year-over-year to RMB167.6 million in third quarter. The overall ROI for recommendation services and marketing and other services improved by six percentage points year-over-year to 141% in the third quarter, reflecting our continuous efforts to expand new business initiatives, monitor customer acquisition costs, and improve operational efficiency. We also continue to execute our cost optimization initiatives. As a result, cost of operation decreased by 30.5% to RMB14.6 million in the third quarter of 2023 from RMB21 million in the same period of 2022. Our sales and marketing expenses, R&D and the general and administrative expenses, decreased by 3.8%, 8.4%, and 1.7% year-over-year, respectively, measured as a percentage of total revenue.
Sales and marketing, R&D, and the G&A expenses in total stood at 32.1% in the third quarter of 2023. With our continued efforts to optimize our cost structure and improve productivity of our business, loss from operations was RMB8.7 million in the third quarter of 2023, compared with RMB31.9 million in the same period of 2022. Operating loss margin was 3.4% in the third quarter of 2023, compared with 11.9% in the same period of 2022. In the third quarter, we recorded net loss and GAAP adjusted net loss of RMB6.4 million and RMB5.6 million, respectively, compared with RMB25.1 million and RMB9.4 million in the same period of 2022. Our net loss margin and non-GAAP adjusted net loss margin for third quarter improved to 2.5% and 2.2%, respectively, compared with the same period of 2022.
As of September 30, 2023, we had RMB687.3 million in cash and cash equivalents, time deposits, and restricted cash and time deposits on our balance sheet. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operators, please go ahead.
Operator:
Liting Lu: Thank you once again for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please contact us at IR@rong360.com. Thank you for your attention, and we hope you have a wonderful day.
Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.
