Ant Group - IPO and Backstory.

The biggest IPO ever so far was Saudi Aramco’s, which brought in $29.4 billion. But this record will probably be broken in the coming weeks by Ant Group (formerly ALIPAY / Ant Financial).

Ant Group is a good example of how Chinese startups often evolve: they start with a relatively simple (= crappy) product and quickly transform it into something extraordinary. But then, instead of stop innovating and focus on scaling, they use their new assets to build ecosystems on top of the original idea. 

ALIPAY started in 2004 basically as an escrow service for Taobao - Alibaba’s eBay clone. They quickly moved into mobile payment and became the market leader there - which was already quite impressive. But they didn’t rest on their laurels.

Instead, Ant Financial was spun off (under somewhat murky circumstances) and built a whole ecosystem around its two main strategic assets: access to data and access to customer funds.

Today Ant Group is the most important digital finance company in the world with three areas of business on top of mobile payment as the core: InvestmentTech, CreditTech and InsurTech.

Click for Ant Group IPO Prospectus.

If you want to know in detail how it happened, check out this article on Medium.com:

How Ant Group Became the Biggest Fintech Company in the World.

Another good source to learn about Ant Group is the latest episode of the Tech Buzz China podcast:

TechBuzzChina - Ep. 74: Ant Group: The Biggest IPO ... Ever?

Btw, do you wonder where the name “Ant” comes from? It shows you what the company’s focus is - not other big corporations, but lots of small customers and micro-companies. Or as Ant puts it: they want to support “the little guys”…