FinTech news in alipay category

China billionaire tech boss Jack Ma plans to cede control of Ant Group, the fintech powerhouse closely affiliated with Alibaba, the e-commerce giant he founded, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Ant informed regulators of Ma’s intention to relinquish control as the company prepared to transition into a financial holding company, The Wall Street Journal reported. The pair has been symbiotic, with Ant’s Alipay app deeply integrated into Alibaba’s suite of retail services and its financial services touted to business owners on Alibaba’s marketplaces. Ant started out as a payments processor of Alibaba, which Ma, at the time the e-commerce firm’s CEO, spun out in 2011.

While Alipay focuses on China’s domestic consumers and merchants, its sister Alipay+ appears to be Ant’s ambition to go after users outside China who have similar cross-border payments needs.

Stenn — which applies big data analytics, taking a few datapoints about a business (the main two being what money it has coming in and going out based on invoices) and matching them up against an algorithm that takes some 1,000 other factors into account to determine its eligibility for a loan of up to $10 million; and on the other side taps a network of institutions and other big lenders to provide the capital for that financing — has raised $50 million in equity funding to expand its business after seeing accelerated growth.

So, users from different countries — Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, for now — can connect their bank or mobile money accounts to Dash, pay bills, and send and receive money to other users while the platform handles currency conversions.

Pakistan-based fintech platform NayaPay has raised $13 million in a seed round to roll out its multi-service messaging and payment app, and to build payment acceptance and financial management tools for businesses in the South Asian country.