What is Ant Group? The Fintech Giant Preparing the World's Largest IPO

Ant Group filed for an IPO. Investors will be able to invest in the Chinese fintech very soon. The spinoff from Alibaba, better know for its mobile payment Alipay is set to be the largest IPO ever at a valuation of over $200bn.
This video will explain why Ant Group is so powerful and valuable, with the help of Street Fighter's Chun Li!
Learn about the origins, brand, strategy and strength of Ant Group but also what it means for the future of Financial System.

00:00 Overview
00:30 Origins
01:06 Character
01:32 Gameplay
02:25 Strengths
02:51: Weaknesses
03:18 Outlook

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ABOUT STREET FIGHTER
Street Fighter is the inspiration for this series. It is a fighting video game franchise developed and published by Capcom. The wide variety of characters provide a nice analogy for the major players in the fintech space.

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FULL AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
Just like Chun Li the chinese character in Street Fighter, 

Ant may not look fearsome, but 

It has become the largest fintech company in the world, 

the most valuable unicorn.

and it is set to become the largest IPO ever


Origins

Through its history Ant has displayed an incredible speed and efficiency in execution


It started as Alipay -  a payment service for Alibaba; the ecommerce giant.  

In 2013 it launched its monetary fund Yu’e Bao (hidden treasure) which became the largest in the world just 4 years later

In 2015 started it launched an online bank

And it keeps  launching new financial services, such as insurance, lending, wealth management

Huabei is a consumer credit platform that supports consumers to “buy now and pay later”

Xiang Hu Bao, which means “mutual protection”, is an online mutual aid platform within the Alipay app. It provides a basic health plan

Zhima Credit is a private and independent credit assessment service.

It’s been expanding its joint-venture and strategic partnerships mainly across Asia

It has more than 1bn active users (vs 330 for paypal) and last year it handled $16trn in payments, nearly 25 times more than PayPal

Character

Brand


Ant Financial vision is ‘to bring about small but positive changes to the world’.

Like ants, its users are individually small, but build great things by working together.

Financial inclusion is important for the company’s culture. With Zhima Credit, It has developed a tech stack to assess creditworthiness with 3 -1-0 strategy

3 minutes to apply

1 second to transfer funds

0 manual intervention


Gameplay and fighting style

Style

The Western World is obsessed with unicorns. Ant and other Chinese fintechs have a different approach: the Octopus.

Thefocus is on cross-selling and integration of different services

“Arslanian”

The core technique

Is to use Alipay for Payments to bring in more business to more profitable activities: lending, insurance, wealth management


STRENGTH / WEAKNESS

Technology is obviously their key strength. Areas like big data, the cloud, digitalisation support all their products and can also be sold as services separately

Ant Is amazing at Product integration and cross selling

And size matters: the number and the range of clients from individuals to SMEs and large firms is hard to beat

BUT

Ant lives in a super competitive environment and is actually losing market share in china

Privacy concerns: the universal credit score looks a lot like universal surveillance - a very Chinese concept  

Pushy: If you’re using some but not all the services. The app will constantly remind you and default to the inhouse products. People started complaining about it 

Finally being Chinese today means the US in particular, may not be willing to open its markets

Future

Imagine Facebook, Amazon, and Paypal  integrated into one app. That’s what Ant has got.

Once it is listed its value will be similar to some of the biggest banks.

Like a big bank will also offer a wide range of products but unlike traditional banks technology will be the common thread behind all of them.

Ant has already  helped China to become the leader in digital transactions. It’s given entrepreneurs and consumers easier access to loans. it changed the way