Jack Ma's Ant Group quickly became one of China's most powerful companies, and its plans for bridging the worlds of tech and finance were growing ever more ambitious by the day.To get more ant group news, you can visit shine news official website.
Now it appears to be turning into the kind of highly regulated Chinese bank that it hoped to supplant.Months after the company's blockbuster initial public offering was shelved at the last minute — a move that appears to have been sparked by Ma's criticism of Chinese regulators — several media outlets have reported that Ant has agreed with authorities to become a financial holding company.
Ant declined to comment on those reports earlier this month, and the details of any potential agreement were not immediately clear. The company did not respond this week to additional questions about any deal with authorities.But the reports suggest that the Alibaba-affiliated company may now have to follow rules similar to those required of traditional Chinese banks — a move that could force it to scale down its aspirations to be a dominant force in the tech world.The company is best known for its Alipay digital payments app, which boasts more than 700 million active users every month.
It also has massive interests in online investing, insurance and consumer lending, which have helped it grow into business with assets worth about $635 billion under management.While the company was largely able to grow unchecked over the past decade, the political winds in Beijing are changing. Authorities are growing increasingly mindful of how much influence Ant and its peers have on the country's financial system — Ant, for example, now commands more than half of the mobile payments market in China — and are looking for ways to rein them in."The Chinese government is moving to regulate these apps with a much heavier hand," said Doug Fuller, an associate professor at the City University of Hong Kong who studies technological development in Asia. "The aim is not to kill these apps, but the days of unrestrained growth and hopes of displacing traditional banking some day are over."