Will fintech change the face of banking?

Fancy new apps have become popular for everything from making a payment to buying insurance and shares. Should the big banks be worried? Simon Wilson reports.

Simon Hu, CEO of Ant Group © Shutterstock
Simon Hu, CEO of Ant Group: the company has brilliantly exploited the abundance of consumer data in China
(Image credit: © Shutterstock)

What’s happening?

In one of the year’s most eagerly anticipated share offerings, China’s biggest fintech business, Ant Group, is expected to list 10% of its shares on the Hong Kong and Shanghai stockmarkets within weeks. If all goes to plan, it hopes to raise $30bn in cash, making it the biggest initial public offering ever in terms of cash raised and valuing the firm at $300bn. That’s more than the market cap of any bank in the world. Ant, which was founded in 2004 as a payments service on the e-commerce giant Alibaba, has had a profound effect on China’s financial system, boosting access to credit for both businesses and consumers.It has more than a billion active users, and last year handled $16trn in payments, about 25 times more than PayPal, the biggest online payments firm outside China.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.