A US$ 4.5 billion Series B round of financing WAS completed by Alibaba’s Ant Financial Services Group, one of the world’s largest online financial services companies, the company said on Tuesday.

According to some sources, the company is now valued at around $60 billion and this latest influx of cash is the largest private-funding round for any internet company.

“This new round of funding will support Ant Financial in its goal to expand access to financial services in China’s rural areas, while also fueling the company’s globalization,” according to Ant Financial.

Investments in part for the further development of the company’s cloud computing infrastructure and biometric verification technologies would be made from the capital raised in the Series B round, the company also said.

Participating in the funding as new strategic investors were the China Investment Corp Capital and CCB Trust, a subsidiary of China Consrrrruction Bank – both of which are leading a consortium.

Existing Ant Financial shareholders, including China Life and other leading Chinese insurance companies, China Post Group, the parent company of Postal Savings Bank of China, China Development Bank Capital and Primavera Capital Group also joined the above mentioned two companies.

Alipay, which provides payment services for e-commerce marketplaces, is the mother company of Ant Financials and the company was established in October of 2014.  The company has since become a comprehensive and open ecosystem providing financial services ranging from payments, wealth management and insurance to micro loans for small and micro enterprises and individual consumers.

FinTech, which is basically financial technology, is a term that represents the modern internet-based solutions to what used to be a very manual banking and commerce practice and the services of Ant Financial fall under that banner.

The topic of financial inclusion is a big focus of the FinTech community. The FinTech community and companies hope to use the ever-increasing ubiquity of the internet to fix the problem of limited access to banking and financial services for people. According to the World Bank, there are more than 2 billion people around the world who have this problem. Most of such people with limited or no access to financial services live in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Ant Financial has already started to expand out of China into India where it has teamed up with Paytm, the country’s largest mobile wallet provider to service Indian customers and the company at present has an active base of some 450 million people, which is more than the population of the United States and the United Kingdom combined.

Over 140 million users in rural China, many of whom have limited access to financial services, use the services of Ant Financial that include payment, insurance and wealth management services in the rural areas of China alone.

Micro loans to over 20 million small and micro businesses and individual entrepreneurs were provided by MYbank, established by Ant Financial in June 2015, and Ant Micro Loan had collectively as of the end of March 2016.

(Adapted from forbes.com)

Categories: Strategy