As a national idol and a self-made billionaire in China, Jack Ma has already shown how he could change the e-commerce industry. He is now creating an internet entertainment empire with Alibaba's previous expansion into music and movies, and now sports.
China’s economy is changing. Consumers have taken to e-commerce in a big way and have clicked and shopped their way to make China's e-commerce industry the biggest in the world. A key enabler has been financial reform, which has let the online and mobile payments industry grow and develop. Yet with the regulations of the past month, you'd be forgiven for scratching your head and wondering what the government had in mind...
Big data continues to be big in China's financial industry as China's Qihoo 360 moves into the segment with a data-driven finance product of its own.
Earlier this week, Finance Asia reported that Yang Kaishen, CEO and Chair of the Industrial Commercial Bank of China stated that recent moves by regulators would be good for innovation. Wait...so the chair of one of the biggest SOEs in the country is in favor of legislation that cuts off the legs of innovation? Well, I'll be...
There's something to be said for the refreshing marketing on Ant Financial's new online wealth management app "Ant Fortune." Whether or not it will actually make a fortune for users is a bit unclear, but you can be sure Alibaba will do well out of it.
Online loans, payments, and banking - nearly every segment of the banking industry has been affected by China's rapidly growing internet finance industry. For the past two years, it has done so without much regulatory oversight or intervention. That looks like it will change soon.
Kapronasia will be presenting at Oracle's Digital Bootcamp on August 4th in Singapore. As a sneak peak of what Zennon will be talking about, here are a couple of intro thoughts on Digital Banking in China
Finger pointing on global stockmarket crashes continues unabated as The China Securities Regulatory Commission starts an investigation into Alibaba invested Hundsun Technology.
As Italy’s economy is struggling to find growth opportunities, well-off Chinese immigrants and businessmen seem to do well in the country. Chinese individuals are reported to be buying everything from fancy cars to real estate and are opening small businesses. But according to local government, their prosperity was not reflected in the local tax records to the extent the government expected it to be.
The big data e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba is now eager to leverage their data on millions of users and transactions in new projects. This time they have followed their formidable rival JD.com by moving into the crowdfunding area to extend financing to SMEs.
Since Beijing became more cautious on the use of foreign technology in the banking sector, Chinese banks have been intensely trying to figure out what to do next. One bank is not waiting and it's no surprise that the soon-to-launched Alibaba-affiliated internet private bank MYbank is moving in lockstep with the government policy as well as develop its own long-term technology strategy. MYbank announced it will be using an in-house cloud computing system instead of products from IBM, Oracle and EMC (IOE).
A whole generation of ordinary Chinese have been neglected in terms of wealth management and banking with high minimum investment thresholds or VIP-only products preventing only a select few from getting access to traditional wealth management products. Alibaba and Tencent have brought innovative internet finance based services such as Tenpay or Alipay to the market and have further opened up wealth management to an entire new segment of the market with 'mass-market' wealth management products. China’s e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba now is after banking industry.
A new partnership between CreditEase and Wellington has changed the rules with an incredibly easy way for the increasingly wealthy middle-class to invest abroad.
According to data from the People's Bank of China, by the end of 2014 China had 614,900 ATMs in operation across the country, up 18.25% from 2013. While certainly a rapid growth, it was actually slower than a year ago when the number of networked ATMs increased by 25.12%, and is significantly lower than its peak growth of 36.18% in 2008.