The new head of Ant Financial's international operations, Douglas Feagin, helped ink a deal with 930,000 merchants across Europe to help Chinese travelers use Alipay; Doug Feagin explained to the Financial Times why the deal was done: "120 million Chinese travelers went abroad in 2015 and that's growing at 18% a year. The vast majority of whom use Alipay."; Alipay has now expanded into India, Europe and Southeast Asia; it is still looking to go public in the near future. Source
Ant Financial announced at Money 20/20 a partnership with payment processor First Data and hardware provider Verifone; new move will expand scope of their wallet product, AliPay, into North America and Europe for wealthy Chinese travelers; AliPay has 450 million active users, totaling nearly 70% of the third party payment market in China. Source
A new filing from Alibaba, who owns 33 percent of Ant Financial, reveals that Alipay claims to have 1.3 billion...
In the last 18 months there has been a wave of consolidation in the payments sector and that trend looks...
Alibaba’s Alipay was granted an eMoney license in Luxembourg to allow the company to serve customers across Europe; the eMoney...
According to a report from UN-based Better Than Cash, between Alibaba's Alipay and Tencent's WeChat, customers sent over $3 trillion in payments in 2016; the chart above shows how far the services have come since 2012; percentage of digital payments (online & mobile) went from 3.5% to 17% of all transactions over the same time period; Alipay and WeChat own 63% of the market for digital payments. Source
The World Economic Forum in collaboration with The European Sting puts forward the interesting idea that the impact of fintech...
Big Banks vs. Silicon Valley Startups – Whose Customer Financial Data Is It Anyway? Mixed Bank Earnings; PeerIQ’s Modeling Archive...
AliPay launched a free service this week which allowed users to generate a profile based on their shopping history; users who signed up were automatically enrolled in their credit-scoring system called Sesame Credit unless they unchecked a box; this led to an outcry from users and a subsequent apology from the company; Bloomberg shares how this highlights a broader concern over transparency of user data in the country. Source
While the Chinese have been quickly adopting fintech in recent years it has come at a cost to the consumer; the Chinese government is able to view troves of information as payment apps like Alipay and WeChat Pay now need to pass through the central bank; not only in fintech but other areas of tech innovation, like facial recognition, has been a boon to the government; while apps and services are making lives simpler and more efficient, they can also help to make government intrusion a lot easier. Source.