What’s in a name? Not much, when it comes to the titans of tech. Amazon — that sprawling, ravenous, emissions-pumping high street killer — certainly lacks the natural harmony of its namesake rainforest. Uber is far from “super”, and often distinctly un-German in its efficiency. Twitter is not so much a cute chirrup as a howling, vomiting vortex. And Apple hasn’t sold a piece of fruit in years.

But the Ant group? Now that’s a true misnomer. Ants, though punchy and peppy, are small things by anyone’s reckoning. But the company that bears its name is not small, or titchy, or scurrying for scraps — it’s a blue whale; a diplodocus; a huge, swirling, sky-darkening swarm of starlings. And it’s set to IPO — the biggest in history — on November 5. Here’s what you need to know about the new(ish) behemoth on the block.

The Shanghai Stock Exchange, where Ant Group will IPO on November 5th


Ant started life in the form of Alipay, a third-party online payment tool created by the Chinese wholesale giant Alibaba in 2004. At that time, eBay was expanding at an incredible rate, and the US site had recently announced plans to enter the Chinese market — prompting Alibaba to launch its own consumer selling platform, Taobao, in order to consolidate its position.

Taobao was a moderate success, though it didn’t make a huge deal of money in the early days as it never took commissions. Mostly, though, it was hamstrung by trust issues. Vendors and buyers were wary of being scammed or ripped off, and for a while the place was seen as eBay’s wilder, less-secure distant cousin.

To combat that image, Alibaba’s Jack Ma set up AliPay as an escrow service that made transactions between buyers and sellers safe. Jack Ma believed that the service was crucial if China was to be a player in e-Commerce — and he wanted to expand Alibaba’s remit by exploiting grey areas in state law.

Soon, Ma had established his own financial infrastructure to rival China’s institutional banks, and by 2006, 300,00 merchants were regularly using Alipay for a wide range of transactions and payments. By 2010, it was affiliated with over 200 Chinese banks.

Today, the service has 1.3 billion active users. (PayPal, by contrast, has 346 million.) It’s heels are being nipped at, however, all the time — WeChat Pay (a sort of Whatsapp/Venmo hybrid) and QQ wallet now own about 40% of the Chinese payment market combined, compared to Alipay’s 55%. But Alipay is in it for the long haul, and focuses on customer retention and loyalty above anything else. The company has also been savvy with its use of customer data and funds, which have allowed it to enter other financial service markets.

Ant Financial was set up in 2014. It was founded as a sort of umbrella company for the entire operation — and its name reflects the ethos of the company: that no transaction is too small; and that many small things, piled together, can be truly mighty.

The group now offers a series of financial services that reach far beyond e-commerce: payments, lending, credit scores, insurance, and even wealth management. One of the niftiest innovations in the latter category is the concept of “leftover treasure”, which allows even the least wealthy customers to invest small funds or spare change. With a return pegged 2% higher than most bank deposit schemes, and relatively small fees, it has swiftly become one of the largest funds in the world. Another clever move was the development of MYbank — an AI-based borrowing tool that lends to small firms that have been rejected by traditional institutions. Xiang Hu Bao, the insurance platform which pledged to give affordable healthcare to low-wage workers, gained over 100 million users in the first year alone. Time and time again, through shrewd innovation and mass-market plays, Ant has propelled itself to the front of several sectors.

And the brand ethos rings true. Put together, the portfolio of offerings, intellectual properties, brands and services means that Ant Group is worth a huge amount of money. What’s more, there is natural and fluent overlap between services — most users on one platform will use three other services. too — which indicates that the company could branch out into almost any sector and take its customers with it. A company representative summed it all up neatly: “The idea is that people are living their lives through this platform.”

Last year, Ant made more than $2.6 billion in profit off $17.5 billion in revenue. In the first half of 2020 alone, profits rocketed to $3.2 billion. Now, the stage is set for an expansion outside China, with links being made in India, Mexico and Thailand. At the same time, the company is looking fiercely inward — and hopes to see off its rivals in the Chinese mainland, too.

What’s more, Ant has just coupled its financial services with a wide range of tech developments, like blockchain and cloud platforms. The messaging around this move once again demonstrates the company’s savvy — they are pitching themselves as tech-first, and coining the term “techfin” in opposition to the ubiquitous “fintech”. Investors love that sort of thing.

Ant’s IPO on November 5th is likely to raise $34.4 billion, easily outsripping flotations by Saudi Aramco ($29.4 billion) and its brother Alibaba ($25 billion). This will value Ant Group at a healthy $313 billion. What’s more, the flotation is a potent symbol of China’s growing international confidence. Now, the country has definitive proof that it can be a leading player in not one, but 

 tech and finance sectors at once. And it will further buoy the nation’s economy, which has already bounced back remarkably from the COVID pandemic.

Perhaps most strikingly, it will show that US money is more than happy to flow into China if the numbers are right — a huge amount of investors buying up the IPO will be from Wall Street.

There are still big hurdles in the way of Ant’s growth. Its dominant size now means it can no longer fudge about in the grey areas of national and international policy. Beijing can be a soft touch on these things when it wants to be, and that historically lax attitude has allowed Ant to grow rapidly. But the government is now wary, and is tightening its grip and focusing its gaze. There are questions of money laundering, of tax evasion, and of rising household debt which may yet dog the firm. And, of course, international investors will be worried by the potential for overhaul by the Chinese state, or the question of data security.

But for now, Ant is a resolute success story. The conglomerate is a true innovator, and with it Jack Ma has shown time and time again that he can offer services and platforms that genuinely outperform their Western counterparts. When the company goes public next week, a new chapter in the history of global capitalism begins. How much of a part Ant plays in that may yet depend on how well it can play by the rules.

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