In late 2014, Alipay Wallet, the mobile app under Alibaba’s finance arm Ant Financial, added a stock portfolio tracker for users to monitor the performance of their portfolios, and read news or other information about listed companies, apart from making mobile payments, paying utility bills, buying mutual funds such as Yuebao, amongst others.
More recently Alipay Wallet enabled bundling accounts with 13 local broker-dealers. But users can only check their stock investments with those dealers but execute trades, for Alipay’s parent company reportedly hasn’t obtained a license for stock trading.
It was reported in the first half of 2014 that the company planned to acquire a private security company which must own a license. Though it hasn’t acquired any security company or obtained a license independently, Ant Financial is developing a separate mobile app that will be able to execute trades, as first noted by bbtnews.