The Chinese central bank People’s Bank of China has asked the fintech company Ant Group to concentrate on its core business with payment services and to overhaul parts of its business areas such as lending and other financial services.

As reported by Reuters news agency, the Chinese supervisory authorities criticized violations of financial regulation and warned the company, among other things, to improve its lending criteria in order to protect personal data. Accordingly, the central bank did not demand the break-up of Ant, but at least indicated the need for significant operational restructuring.

According to the Financial Times, Ant reacted immediately and announced that it would revise its lines of business and better comply with regulations. They immediately started working on plans to meet the requirements.

Alipay: Over 1 billion users The dated Chinese billionaire Jack Ma founded offshoot of the e-commerce platform Alibaba operates the mobile payment service Alipay, which is popular in Asia, and now also offers insurance, loans and other financial services. According to its own information, over a billion people use Alipay worldwide. In Chinese shops, payments are now almost exclusively made by mobile phone, either via Alipay or the competitor Wechat Pay.

The criticism from Beijing comes two months after the The supervisory bodies of the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges had stopped the IPO of the Ant Group. This could have gone down in history with 34, 5 billion US dollars as the largest IPO of all time, had surprisingly failed two days earlier. Jack Ma had accused the regulatory authorities of slowing down innovations in the past.

(acb)