Economics
China's Got Jack Ma's Finance Giant in Its Crosshairs
- Draft rules may impose capital requirements on Ant Financial
- Regulatory risk looms over company’s highly anticipated IPO
Jack Ma’s finance giant is now larger than Goldman - but is it getting too big for Beijing?
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There’s no other company on Earth quite like Ant Financial.
Spanning online payments, insurance, lending, credit scores, asset management and more, Jack Ma’s Chinese behemoth resembles a mashup of PayPal, Geico, Wells Fargo and Equifax -- with a bit of BlackRock thrown in for good measure. Thanks to clever mobile apps and a burgeoning Chinese middle class, Ant oversees the world’s biggest money-market fund and handles more than $2.4 trillion of mobile payments every three months. Many of the company’s 870 million customers rely on it for nearly every aspect of their financial lives.