Online payments have taken over cash operations at a speed rate. Nowadays, people would rather pay through online methods than by classical means. Investors from all over the world felt the worldwide need to make payments by modern means and created companies specialized in this kind of operations.
One of these smart businessmen is Jack Ma. He has created a company that is already worth over $150 billion. Now, he seems to be willing to do the same thing with Ant Financial, a name that is becoming huge in the world of online payments.
Several reports say that the Chinese tech company is willing to raise billions of dollars from business people who will become its’ investors. In their opinion, the company would be worth $150 billion and this is an estimation prior to the initial public offering.
Ant is part of another company founded by Ma, Alibaba. The holding was valued at $168 billion in 2014, when it was first published at the New York Stock Exchange. Now, the value has considerably grown up to over $445 billion.
Better known as Alipay platform, Ant Financial has serious competition to face; the WeChat Pay platform owned by Tencent is choosing by millions of Chinese shoppers every day. This is not surprising, since everything is bought in China through mobile payment apps. Since the trend is similar all over the world, Ant had the perfect conditions for expanding its services around the Earth.
The difference was made thanks to the diverse services provided to users: next to the online payments, the company also offers an app for the money market fund and opportunities for businesses. These options drawn many investors.
According to economical publications, Ant is heading towards raising at least $8-10 billion only from investors and they will use the money to continue their international expanding. So far, they have partnerships with other mobile payment platforms like Kakao Pay in South Korea, Dana in Indonesia, Paytm in India and GCash in the Philippines.
