Ant Group, formerly known as Ant Financial and Alipay, is an affiliate company of the Chinese Alibaba Group. Ant Financial is the world’s highest-valued FinTech company, and most valuable unicorn (start-up) company, with a valuation of US$150 billion.
In March 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that Ant’s flagship Tianhong Yu’e Bao money-market fund was the biggest in the world, with over 588 million users of Ant’s mobile payments network Alipay contributing, more than a third of China’s population.
Ant Group’s IPO was halted in 2020 after the Chinese government intervened, citing rising concerns about the company’s growth and potential systemic threats to the financial industry.
