Description
Ant Group formerly known as Ant Financial and Alipay, is an affiliate company of the Chinese Alibaba Group. The group owns China's largest digital payment platform Alipay, which serves over one billion users and 80 million merchants, with total payment volume (TPV) reaching CN¥118 trillion in June 2020. In March 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that Ant's flagship Tianhong Yu'e Bao money-market fund was the largest in the world, with over 588 million users, or more than a third of China's population, contributing cash to it.
In October 2020, Ant Group was set to raise US$34.5 billion in the world's largest IPO at the time, valuing the company at US$313 billion. On the eve of the IPO, China stopped the process from moving forward. It was reported that the Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping personally scuttled the Ant IPO.
