Ant Group

Ant Group (Chinese: 蚂蚁集团; pinyin: Mǎyǐ jítuán), formerly known as Ant Financial, is an affiliate company of the Chinese conglomerate Alibaba Group. Ant Group was initially the financial transaction arm of Alibaba, Alipay, when it was set up in 2004. Alibaba's e-commerce sites faced the problem of not having a payment system to process payments for their online sites. With Alipay, customers on Alibaba's e-commerce sites, Tmall, Taobao, and Alibaba's B2B site could make payments through their Alipay, and the amount was withheld until delivery was made. The amount of online traffic made Alipay profitable despite its low transaction fee because of the number of users, which currently numbers at more than a billion. It operates Alipay, a major mobile payment platform in China, reported to have over 1.3 billion users as of 2020. As of 2024, it is the sixth largest fintech company in the world. In March 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported Ant's flagship Tianhong Yu'e Bao money-market fund was the largest in the world, with over 588 million users. In October 2020, Ant Group planned to raise US$34.5 billion in what would have been one of the largest IPO in history, valuing the company at US$313 billion. However, Chinese regulators suspended the listing shortly before it was to occur. On 12 April 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that under the pressure from the Chinese government, Ant Group would be transformed into a financial holding company overseen by the People's Bank of China.