One of the first posts I ever wrote on Lend Academy back in 2010 was about mulling the idea of...
Prior to the license, the company operated as a platform for other third party funds to sell products through their wealth management platform Qian.qq.com and WeChat; now the company will be able to sell direct to its nearly 1 billion users; the company already had licenses for mobile payments, insurance and micro finance. Source
German Digital bank N26 has raised $160mn to fund their U.S expansion plans; Tencent and Allianz were lead investors in the round and it could set the stage for a future IPO according to N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf; “It's a good round to be as independent as possible,” Stalf said to TechCrunch. “This funding round really brings N26 to a pre-IPO stage. I think we see a clear path to a very sustainable company with this funding round. Maybe in the next five years there will be an IPO.”; the bank currently has eight staff members in NY and customers have been signing up on the waiting list since October 2017. Source.
Tencent and Alibaba have built firms that enable them to write significant checks and have crowded out private equity and venture capital firms; SoftBank is the only other regional player on a similar level; they are not always driven by returns like traditional investors and this allows them to define success differently; some private equity firms are beginning to wonder if they are beginning to abuse their power; if a company receives investment from one of these giants they are also not held to the same pressures of a traditional investor like going public; these giants are helping to push innovation across the region and globe, but many are starting to ask at what cost. Source.
In 2015 China’s Central Bank contracted eight companies, including affiliates of Tencent, Ping An and Alibaba, to help build a...
This weeks WeiyangX Fintech Review on Crowdfund Insider covered the PBoC discussing key findings in their fintech sandbox program; Pinganfang.com found itself involved in a US crowdfunding fraud case; JD Finance and China UnionPay partnered on a blockchain based risk information sharing mechanism; Alibaba executive chairman Jack Ma announced that Ant Financial will delay their IPO; Tencent reached an agreement with China CITIC Bank to cooperate on cloud services, a financial big data platform and security. Source.
The Shenzhen Securities Regulatory Bureau issued the year’s first fund sales license to Tencent Holdings; the company will operate as Teng An Fund Sales; WeChat adds a police certified facial recognition technology as part of a pilot program they hope to roll out to all of China in late January; some loans on HNA’s p2p platform JBH have dealt with deferred payments a since November. Source.
Naspers is the most valuable listed company in Africa and is now selling $10 billion worth of shares in Tencent to invest in fintech, classified and online food delivery businesses; Naspers stake in Tencent is estimated at $545 billion; this is the first time the company has sold shares in the company after initially investing in 2001. Source
China has been looking to create a credit scoring system seen in many developed economies like the U.S. and the U.K.; initially asking 8 top companies to be involved, though they found it hard to form as companies were unwilling to share proprietary data with competitors; the PBoC is now tasked with having a industry wide system that does not favor giants like Alibaba and Tencent. Source.
China’s government has tried for many years to establish a credit system that rivals the U.S. and Europe, but has...