Alibaba Affiliate Ant Financial in Deal to Buy MoneyGram International – WSJ (Jan 26, 2017)

I’ve commented a couple of times in the last week or so on payments-related stories, and have talked abbot the relative immaturity and fragmentation that characterize mobile payments. But those comments were referring to Western markets, and the situation in China is very different, with massive adoption of mobile payments across several major platforms, and Alibaba has been one of the largest players. It has separated its payment activities into a separate entity, Ant Financial, which has been becoming more and more like a bank in its own right, and is now about to buy MoneyGram, a large global person-to-person payments provider. This is a rare example of a Chinese company buying a global player to extend its reach into other markets – it’s been much more common for Chinese companies to expand organically, and generally that hasn’t gone well.

via WSJ

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• Alibaba

• China
• Payments

• Chinese Expansion

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