Perhaps you haven’t heard of Ant Financial, but you must know of the Chinese giant Alibaba. As an affiliate company of Alibaba, Ant Financial is the parent company of Alipay, which provides leading mobile payment services both in China and globally.
Rumours have been circulating for a long time about the IPO of Alipay. Finally Ant Financial has announced today its plan to IPO on both Shanghai Stock Exchange’s Star Board and The Stock Change of Hong Kong. It’s reported that the target is valued at least 200 billion dollars. Therefore, it’s regarded as one of this year’s biggest IPOs in Asia.
According Alibaba’s 2020 financial statement, the total active users of Ant Group and its nine local digital wallet partners has surpassed 1.3 billion. Furthermore, Ant Group is expanding its business empire. Compared with Alipay, Ant Financial is not limited to the payment service business. Instead, it expands business to payment scenarios, digital finance and technology service. In other words, the new Alipay is not only a payment service provider. It is graduating into a digital finance ecology. Above all, we see huge potential for growth and expansion in the foreseeable future.
As a listed company, Ant Financial and Alipay will be more transparent and monitored by the public. This transparency will build trust and keep the public informed. However, it brings higher requirements and challenges to the company. In short, it may lose freedom to some degree. Importantly, the huge cash investment generated by IPO would accelerate the growth of the fintech company, especially after the economic downturn post-pandemic.
For more financial information, please see the articles from Financial Times here. https://www.ft.com/content/0ede30bb-ef34-436e-89d5-f62a02b78aa0
If you would like to know more about cross-border payment like Alipay, WeChat Pay and Union Pay, please find more from our website.
