Jack Ma’s Alibaba and Ant Financial leave Paytm Mall
The Indian firm’s valuation fell from $3 billion in 2020 to $13 million now – a drop of almost 99%.
Alibaba
China’s central bank issues Ant Group ultimatum after blocked IPO
The Peoples’ Bank of China wants Ant to overhaul its business or face the consequences.
Chinese regulators consider AliPay and WeChat antitrust probe
The People’s Bank of China is serious about curbing the giants’ dominance.
HSBC joins Alibaba to offer Hong Kong’s online merchants quick loans
This is the first time HSBC will use third-party data to approve trade finance loans.
Tokopedia lines up $1.5bn funding from Alibaba and Softbank
The $1.5bn funding would value Tokopedia at between $8bn and $9bn.
Chinese regulators planning digital banking go-ahead
New set of rules could see a bevy of digital challengers in China.
Tencent brings third player UnionPay to China’s mobile payments arena
UnionPay’s QuickPass serves just 240m users, whilst 1.2bn use Tencent’s WeChat.
Alipay aims for integration with 10m European SMEs by 2024
Chinese payments firm continues its acceptance march in Europe.
Trustly serves Alibaba’s European customers via Ingenico
Alibaba serves ten million buyers.
Qupital raises $15m Series A to expand into mainland China
Hong Kong fintech plans to hire and grow.
Kabbage powers Alibaba’s pay later payments programme
Alibaba’s SME customers can get up to $150,000 of financing.
Banking Technology November 2018 issue out now
Fintech inception. Ideas come to life.
Alibaba enters Banking Circle for shapely payments
Tech titan will use infrastructure and network.
Paytm launches AI cloud for India
Designed for developers, start-ups and enterprises.
Alipay and Tenpay fined for breaking Chinese FX rules
China wants to keep money within its confines.
Alibaba’s Jack Ma teams with Ganesh Ventures for Indian start-up action
Ma’s new eWTP Ecosystem Fund brings a boost.
Fintech funding round-up: 10 April 2018
Stars JP Morgan, Access Fintech, SenseTime, Alibaba, Kaleidofin and CloudMargin.
Top fintech stories this week – 6 April 2018
Catch up on FinTech Futures’ top five fintech stories of the week – all in one place!
SoftBank and Alibaba to invest $445m in Paytm E-Commerce
Values the Indian firm at about $1.9 billion.
Ant Financial invests $184.5m in Telenor Microfinance Bank
Ant Financial now owns a 45% stake in Pakistan’s Telenor Microfinance Bank (TNB).
Alibaba acquires 33% stake in Ant Financial affiliate for fintech fuel
Looking to “participate in the future growth” of the fintech sector.
Alibaba Cloud brings big data programme to Malaysia
To get experts to collaborate and compete in developing tech solutions.
Microsoft and Alibaba officially have AI that’s smarter than humans
They beat humans using the Stanford Question Answering Dataset – aka SQuAD.
Top fintech stories this week – 13 October 2017
Catch up on Banking Technology’s top five fintech stories of the week – all in one place!
Alibaba sets aside $15bn R&D war chest to be a world beater
How do you try and become one of the biggest and most influential technology companies in the world? Just move the $15 billion you have stashed away into the R&D business.
China dreams of AI domination
The Chinese government has set out its bold vision to become a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030. In a Cabinet statement, the government sees AI as integral to making China an “economic power” and is calling for the development of skills, research and educational resources to achieve “major breakthroughs” by 2025 and […]
Fintech funding round-up: 15 May 2017
Brevity and celerity. It’s our latest fintech funding round-up for a quick fix – featuring Axoni, Citi, MarketInvoice, Banco BNI Europa, Alibaba and Qupital. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) provider Axoni has revealed that Citi has joined its Series A funding round, bringing the total amount raised to over $20 million. Citi joins a group of […]
HelloPay merges with Ant Financial for AliPay boost
HelloPay Group, which runs the HelloPay payment platform and online shopping and selling site Lazada, has merged with China’s Ant Financial. Ant Financial, part of Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group, runs Alipay and so HelloPay has now been rebranded as Alipay Singapore, Alipay Malaysia, Alipay Indonesia and Alipay Philippines in its respective markets. Douglas Feagin, SVP […]
Alibaba targets Amazon with $177m stake in Paytm e-commerce
India-based Paytm’s e-commerce unit has raised $200 million in a funding round led by Chinese titan Alibaba, with the latter potentially muscling in on Amazon’s arena of action. Alibaba’s Singapore unit will invest $177 million into Paytm E-Commerce, with $23 million coming from Indian venture and growth capital fund SAIF Partners. With the deal Alibaba […]
AWS, IBM, Google and Azure dominate cloud revenues
Synergy Research has released its latest findings for the global cloud computing market, painting a worrying picture for any challengers looking to cash in on the craze.
New Zealand announces new fintech working group
The New Zealand Tech Industry Association (NZTech) is launching a new working group, FinTechNZ, which will focus on financial innovation and technology. This working group will be inaugurated in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland next week.
Nod and pay a virtual reality with Alibaba
Alibaba has revealed a new payment service that lets virtual reality (VR) shoppers pay just by nodding their heads. Called VR Pay, it’s been developed by Ant Financial’s (Alibaba’s financial arm) incubator F Lab, and it’s another innovation in the lively and overcrowded payments arena. With the tech, shoppers (bovine at the best of times) […]
Payments round-up: 11 August 2016
They said it. We read it. We edit. Here’s a round-up of events in the payments space to save you time. Payments platform Payza has expanded the availability of its Payza Prepaid Card to the majority of its account holders worldwide. It was initially launched to a “limited group” in December 2015, but Firoz Patel, […]
China: where the digital payments action is
Earlier this year a couple of surveys were released indicating that the real action in digital payments is in China. This shouldn’t be surprising: China’s economy continues to grow (despite doomsayers predicting a coming “crash” for at least a decade) and the Chinese government is investing billions into science and technology. The fruits of this […]
Banks could lose customer interaction role to new entrants
If children trust Google more than they trust a bank, tomorrow’s customers may well hold their money with digital companies instead of traditional banks. That thought worries senior banking industry speakers speaking at the BBA conference in London on Thursday.
Barclays’ Harte: Alibaba and the forty fears of bank transformation
Michael Harte, chief operations and technology officer at Barclays, says the growth of Chinese online e-commerce business Alibaba is the threat that keeps him awake at night – and that major banks could be in danger of losing touch with their own customers.
