Jack Ma’s Ant Financial to raise $9bn, become world’s biggest unicorn — Wall Street Journal — “Chinese billionaire Jack Ma’s financial technology business is about to vault into the ranks of the world’s most valuable companies. Ant Financial Services Group, carved out of his e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd seven years ago, is preparing to raise US$9bn in a private funding round, according to people familiar with the matter. That ups a previous fundraising target of US$5bn.”
Jack Ma’s Ant Financial nearly doubles profits amid deal push — Bloomberg — “The company controlled by Alibaba’s billionaire co-founder Jack Ma racked up an 86% jump in pretax profit to 5.56 billion yuan ($814 million) in the year ended March, according to Bloomberg’s calculations… Since starting as Alipay in 2004, Ant Financial has grown into an online giant that controls more than half of China’s $5.5 trillion mobile payments market.”
Ant Financial extends online credit service to retailers — China Daily — “Ant Financial Services Group, the online finance firm backed by billionaire Jack Ma, will extend its online consumer credit service to four million retail businesses across the country to boost sales and encourage spending－as China’s consumers increasingly feel more comfortable shopping with borrowed money.”
Alibaba founder and executive chairman Jack Ma has demonstrated a prototype biometric verification service that could enable a payment to be authorized by simply capturing an image of a mobile phone user’s face. More
Apple Pay saw more than one million card activations within 72 hours of launch and is already the leading NFC payments player in the US, Apple CEO Tim Cook has revealed during the Wall Street Journal’s WSJDLive event. Cook also outlined future growth plans for the service, including a potential partnership with Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba. More
Feed for stories about Jack Ma.
