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
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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
Central bank digital currencies have taken on more importance in the last few years with China leading the way as...
Chris Skinner’s new book called Digital Human will be launching this month; he sat down with Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays Bank UK, and Li Wang, Head of Alipay and Ant Financial for EMEA at his London book launch; in this blog post he shares video of the panel which took place; some of the highlights include Ashok sharing how Barclays has been able to adapt over the 300 years it has been in business and the certainty he has that they will be able to adapt going forward; Li shares how each employee at Ant generates RMB100 million or over £10 million in revenue per year, a stark contrast to efficiency at banks. Source
Ant Financial has rolled out the world's first commercial application of a payment system that identifies payers using facial recognition technology; starting from September 1, a KFC restaurant in Hangzhou allows customers to authenticate their payments by having their faces scanned; the whole process, which takes about ten seconds, does not require users to take out their cell phones; the function is powered by Face ++ technology developed by Beijing startup Megvii. Source
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
Alibaba payment affiliate Ant Financial has announced the acquisition of helloPay; the company is based in Singapore and will help support Alipay's strategic growth initiatives in Southeast Asia; its primary payments focus is on serving e-commerce platforms; helloPay will be rebranded as Alipay following the acquisition. Source
China’s fintech market is the biggest and most powerful in the world, especially when it comes to Alipay and WeChat...
After a yearlong battle trying to convince US regulators about their acquisition of MoneyGram, Alibaba’s Ant Financial called off the deal; having a significant presence in the US is the one area that Alibaba head Jack Ma has yet to succeed; the $1.2bn deal would have helped to establish their Alipay product immediately; this looks to potentially ratchet up trade issues between the two countries as the new administration has taken an aggressive stance towards China. Source.