Jack Ma’s ‘descendant’ presents plans to turn Alipay into a ‘super app’, serving all of the customer’s daily necessities

One of Jack Ma’s “descendants” is speeding up Alipay’s transformation into an online hub that has everything from lending, travel to food delivery. This is said to be an attempt to regain customers who have fallen into rival Tencent.

Ant Group CEO Simon Hu is pushing hard on the presentation of digital payments and cloud services for Chinese subsidiaries of KFC Holdings and Marriott, expanding the company’s focus from banks and hedge funds. This article has become a popular application.

Alibaba’s strategy is divided into 2 parts. They will ruin Tencent and food delivery giant Meituan Dianping – companies that attract local buyers to their platforms, undermining Ant’s dominance of the mobile payment market worth 29 trillion of China. Hu will also diversify Ant’s businesses into less sensitive areas after the company is heavily inspected with a strong expansion in financial services.

“We want to help digitize the service industry,” Hu said in an interview with foreign traditions. “We are pursuing a strategy to turn Ant into a technology company with an open platform strategy for years.”

Hu wants users to think of Alipay as not just a financial service provider and payment gateway for the world’s largest e-commerce platforms, but also an application that meets the needs of buying vegetables. tubers to property management, hotel reservations and loans. He aims to simultaneously sell technological solutions such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and risk control for businesses in need.

His goal is to have more than 80% of Ant’s revenue coming from domestic merchants and financial companies in 5 years, up from 50% by the end of 2019. Contribution from asset services such as market funds Ant’s currency and lending services will also increase.

“We want to share the technology and resources we have developed as an online financial platform with many other companies in the fields of finance, local services, public services and other countries.” The switch doesn’t hinder any IPO plans and the company will still plan to list on the stock exchange.

To mark this transformation, Ant changed its registered name to Ant Group from Ant Financial Group in late May. Alibaba owns 33% of Ant’s stake.

The focus on daily consumer services pushed Ant and the position of a latecomer. While Alipay still controls more than half of all mobile transactions in China, it is still a follower of initiatives that created small services within apps created by Tencent three years ago.

The initiative allows Tencent to own more than 1 million service providers in the WeChat environment, with 400 million users a day using it to rent bicycles, order food, book movie tickets and even buy Apartment through a single platform. Their popularity has boosted Tencent’s market share and mobile payment revenue.

Hu’s most important task is to eliminate competitors like Tencent. But companies like Meituan and streaming application Kuaishou are also major challenges in Alibaba’s ecosystem expansion, aside from e-commerce and payment.

Alipay’s platform provides natural advantages to compensate for the losses. Their interface allows users to personalize, pin frequently used services the company plans to use algorithms to focus more on the landing page (a page with an interface, content and domain name close to it. like a normal website) of Alipay.

Ant currently has more than 600 million users with 2 million small applications after 2 years.

“Alipay is trying to take advantage of super apps with small apps, giving users faster access to services through their platform compared to WeChat.”

Such efforts are showing results. Alipay’s market share of mobile payments has increased for three consecutive quarters, rising to 55.1% in the fourth quarter according to iResearch. Tencent saw its market share increase to 38.9%.

Hu – who joined Alibaba in 2005 after working at a Chinese construction bank. At Alibaba, he gained a reputation for launching new initiatives such as using data analysis tools to provide financial services for small businesses and helping Alibaba compete Amazon to build electric businesses. largest cloud computing in Asia.

His experience will help Ant target small businesses in consumer services seeking to digitize.

Hu is also responsible for bringing Ant stable development through the economic downturn due to the Covid-19 epidemic.

Huabei – the name of a service that means “just spend” of Alibaba is helping banks issue 2 trillion yuan ($ 283 billion) of consumer loans in 2021. MYbank online bank – a branch Ant’s helped banks issue 600 billion yuan of loans to 10 million small and medium businesses by the end of May.

NPL ratio of Huabei and MYbank increased to 2% compared to 1.5% before the epidemic. Compared to that, Fitch Ratings predicts bad debt ratio with Chinese banks could increase 2% to 3.5% compared to the first half of last year.