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How Ant Group Became the Biggest Fintech Company in the World
Alibaba built the “Amazon of the East.” Now, its fintech spinoff is set to be the biggest IPO of the year.
In an IPO market that’s on fire, the biggest is yet to come: Ant Group, a Chinese online payments giant, created by Alibaba founder, Jack Ma. The company filed for its IPO this week and is expected to be the most valuable company ever to go public on a global stock exchange. The company plans to sell 10% of its shares on Shanghai’s Nasdaq-like exchange and 5% on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, according to MarketWatch.
The Chinese company is looking to raise a record-breaking $30 billion in its IPO, which is expected to happen by October (for context, Saudi Arabia’s oil giant, Aramco, raised $25.6 billion in its IPO last December).
Ant Group is the fintech to beat all fintechs, and the success of its IPO will be determined by how the market perceives its tech relative to its fin. The company is the ultimate mashup between Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, Venmo, FICO, and any of the multiple fintech companies in the U.S. that offer lending, savings, and insurance products. While the stocks of tech companies have risen strongly over the past few months with the Nasdaq up roughly 25% above where it was in February, the stocks of financial companies, like U.S. Bancorp and PNC, have languished. Meanwhile, with an estimated $200 billion valuation, Ant Group is worth more than most global banks. Here’s how Ant Group became the largest fintech company in the world.
What is Ant Group?
Ant Financial, now known as Ant Group, was founded in 2004 by Jack Ma. It was five years after he founded Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce company often hailed as the Amazon of the East. Ma had identified a problem of customer trust, which was impeding growth in his e-commerce business. Given relatively weak consumer protection laws in China and deteriorating consumer confidence around quality control…
