Yifubao, the third-party payments unit of Suning Commerce (SZ:002024), reportedly planned to dip toes into fund and financial service industry on heels of Alipay’s Yuebao (source in Chinese).
A raft of Internet giants swarmed into the financial industry to capitalize on the online financial management mania agitated by Yuebao. JD.com announced that its online payment service will debut at the end of this year. Tencent’s Tenpay stroked a deal with China Southern Asset Management and Sina released Micro-Bank to tap into online financial sector.
Several online financial companies comes under spotlight, including Rong 360, Renrendai, 1234567.com.cn’s Huoqibao and China Universal’s Xianjinbao. Internet finance is consisted of nearly ten sub-branches, such as online payment, loan and funds, according to China E-commerce Research Center. Industry insiders predicted that the future financial products will tend to address a specific vertical market to make the best use of short-term funds from customers.
Experts predicted that the market size for short-term monetary funds is around 100 billion to 200 billion yuan, not as big as expected because its annual yield is only slightly higher than the annual interests from banks (source in Chinese).
Suning is in discussion with more than ten well-known fund companies to prepare for the launch of Yifubao-based financial products. Yuebao, the arch-rival of Yifubao, reportedly would cooperate with 37 fund companies.
Suning claimed that Yifubao has more than 30 million members, recording an annual turnover of tens of billions yuan. Yifubao differs from Yuebao in two aspects, according to people familiar with the matter. It provides services to both consumers and businesses, while Yuebao serves consumers only. Suning boasts more than 1,600 brick-and-mortar stores, endowing Suning the possibility to put forward offline financial services, the source added.