Alipay, part of Ant Financial / Alibaba, just had a gangbusters day as all of the transactions for Singles Day were processed through the payment platform. More than five years ago, Alipay topped PayPal to become the world leader in mobile payments – something that should come as no surprise to Fintech followers.
As of January 2019, together with its global JV partners, Ant Financial served 1 billion users worldwide.
Singles Day, which takes place every year on November 11 (11/11), emerged in 1993 so the story goes. Over time Singles Day has grown into the largest single shopping day in the world. For Alibaba, the 11.11 shopping festival began in 2009 with participation from just 27 merchants as an event for merchants and consumers to raise awareness about the value of online shopping. More than 200,000 brands participated in this year’s event.
Today, Alibaba is reporting on the event and it has broken the previous record having transacted RMB 268,444,058,381 or USD $38,379,306,366 – an enormous number – in just one day.
And all of those transactions were processed by Alipay on Alibaba’s China retail marketplaces, Lazada, AliExpress, Kaola and New Retail and consumer services platforms within a 24-hour period.
According to Alibaba, in just 68 seconds $1 billion was processed via Alipay. In the first hour, that number hit $12 billion.
In a way, Alipay is indicative of how prevalent Fintech payments have become in China and how advanced Fintech is in China in comparison to much of the rest of the world.
It is important to emphasize that Ant Financial is not just about Alipay. This past March, Ant Financial announced the launch of a “distributed core banking platform.” The DCBP is a next generation banking product which is designed to help financial institutions shift their business models from transaction-oriented to customer-oriented. Digital banking, available on your mobile phone, is the future.
Ant Financial is working on even more including blockchain, AI and other offerings as it seeks to become the future of financial services – available everywhere – untethered from traditional finance.
