Hello Fintech friends,

November was a chaotic month for China with the riots over the continued zero-covid policy. People have raised a lot of concerns on the negative economic impact of covid controls. One most recent examples of it is that Alibaba’s annual Singles Day has experienced the slowest ever sales growth.

(Source: Al Jazeera)

With the gloomy economic outlook in mind, Chinese fintechs are making more efforts on global expansion and new product launches, especially around lending and consumer financing products. You will read about them in this month’s newsletter.

Enjoy the read!

Yours,

Ning

News

• Chinese authority is poised to impose a fine of more than $1B on Jack Ma’s Ant group, potentially ending its two-year long regulatory battle
• PBOC’s push to share user data with state-owned credit-scoring agencies is met with resistance from Chinese tech giants like Tencent and Meituan
• Tiktok Shop Indonesia has reportedly partnered with Shanghai-based payments fintech iPaylinks (Source: LinkedIn Post); TikTok also has finally entered the US eCommerce space with the launch of Tiktok Shop
• Credit Suisse laid off one-third of its China-based investment banking team
• Wells Fargo and HSBC Add Offshore Yuan to FX System

Venture Financing

• Ant Group’s Consumer Finance Unit raises $1.5B, and HFI (an investment group owned by Hangzhou government) became the second largest stakeholder.
• JD.com’s fintech unit aims to win Beijing’s approval for its HK IPO as soon as end of the year. It failed once earlier this year.
• UponeShare split from Tiger (Nasdaq: TIGR) and raised angel round from investors like Xiaomi and Sinoation Ventures. The size of the deal was not disclosed.

Product Launches

• Anext Bank, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ant Group, plans to offer loans to small and medium-sized businesses across Singapore
• Korea-based Kakao Pay and Malaysia-based Touch n’ Go are available in China with the new Alipay partnership
• HK-based virtual bank ZA Bank partners with Wise to offer international transfers to HongKongers
• Lithuania-based fintech Paysera has partnered with Airwallex to open USD payment corridor to China
• Thunes rolls out instant payouts to WeChat users
• Lianlian Global launches partnerships with three European fintechs (Spanish Ritmo, UK-based YouLend and Iwoca) to offer lending services
• Chinese fintechs are catching the BNPL trend with Airwallex’s partnership with Atome, PingPong’s partnership with Klarna and the launch of Ant Group’s Ant Bank Paylater