WeChat Pay, Alipay and UnionPay signs in a store in Suzhou. Credit: Shwangtianyuan, Creative Commons
For a brief window from 2013 to 2016, China’s government encouraged its private tech firms to enter finance and take on outdated state-owned banks. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), one of the world’s largest central banks, bet that competition would force incumbents to modernize. That opening led to a golden age of financial innovation — and what could be the world’s largest initial public offering.
On Tuesday [Aug 25], Ant Group, the financial technology, or “fintech,” giant spun out of e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, filed for a dual listing in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Its planned IPO could raise as much as $30 billion and value the company at more than $200 billion. Ant is now worth significantly more than Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley combined in terms of market capitalization.
During the window when China opened banking to tech companies, fintech firms like Ant and Tencent’s WeChat started offering financial services with the tap of a mobile phone screen, a
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