China’s leadership plans to split the popular financial app Alipay and move important parts to new applications. That reports the Financial Times and explains that Alipay should also be obliged to provide important user data for the new apps. From the popular app, which has more than a billion users, parts would then have to be removed that fulfill the functions of a credit card (“Hubaei”) and one for small loans (“Jiebei”), writes the newspaper. It is precisely these two parts that are responsible for the latest financial successes of the group, which was recently the focus of the authorities in China.
Spin-off of the sales driver The news is the latest in a long string of negative news for the Chinese giant Alibaba, whose subsidiary Ant is responsible for the app. The problems for Alibaba began a year ago after founder Jack Ma criticized the tax authorities shortly before the Ant Group’s planned IPO. As a result, the authorities canceled this, the largest IPO in history, for a short time and have since then been increasingly beating Alibaba. Jack Ma disappeared from the scene. In the spring, China’s competition watchdogs imposed a record fine of 18 billion yuan on Alibaba. Recently, Beijing had stepped up against the tech giants in the country.
The leadership in Beijing believes that the great power of the IT giants rests on the personal data they have amassed, the Quote: d the Financial Times now an anonymous source on the background to the demolition plans. This power should now be broken. It had already been reported that Ant’s credit business is to be split up and partially outsourced to a new company over which the financial group has no sole control. It was not known that this should also directly affect the popular Alipay app, writes the Financial Times . Alipay could then no longer evaluate the creditworthiness of customers in the future and would have to leave that to the new services.