Photo credit: Alibaba.
China’s biggest online finance app today pushed into the US market with the acquisition of a money transfer service for US$880 million.
The deal sees Ant Financial, a spin-off from online shopping giant Alibaba and the company behind China’s popular Alipay app, snap up Texas-based Moneygram, founded back in 1988, for a premium over its US$633 million valuation on NASDAQ.
Moneygram operates in more than 200 countries with a global network of 347,000 agent offices for its money wire services for individuals and businesses.
See: China’s fintech industry shows where the rest of the world is heading
Alibaba’s new world order
With this buy-out, Jack Ma – China’s richest tech boss with a net worth of US$28 billion – is creating a global fintech business, offering financial services to its users across China (Alipay), the US (Moneygram), and India (Ant investee Paytm).
A Moneygram outlet in Beirut. Photo credit: Panoramio.
Alibaba has a number of other important assets around the world – such as its ownership of Southeast Asian online store Lazada – but it has yet to tie them all together into a coherent empire that can challenge Amazon and Rakuten.
Eric Jing, Ant’s CEO, hailed the deal as making it simpler and safer “for people around the world to remit funds, especially in major economies such as the United States, China, India, Mexico, and the Philippines.”
It comes just over two months after Ant Financial – which last year secured US$4.5 billion in funding ahead of a mooted IPO this year or next – made inroads into Thailand via an investment.
This acquisition awaits the approval of MoneyGram stockholders.
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