Chris Skinner, the most authorative voice on fintechs and one of the smartest guys in banking, has just published a blog “The truth about Ant Financial” reviewing the past, present and future of Ant Financial in which he highlights how:

• Alipay monitors every transaction from its 450 million users, in real-time with artificial intelligence monitors constantly searching for potentially fraudulent transactions, and how “ (Target is two billions users by 2025.)
• Alipay “moved from basic escrow services to real-time payments to cloud to microservices, and are now working on their new machine learning and super intelligent structure. A structure that can process 250,000 transactions per second today, and is architecting systems that will scale to over 100 billion transactions per day.” (Visa and MasterCard handle just over 60 billion transactions per year combined, and average near 2,000 transactions per second.)
• Ant Financial is already the biggest money market fund in the world. It is a very different fund: “It is a method for consumers to store a balance to spend on Taobao, and get some interest. Alternatively, it’s a micro savings tool in a mobile wallet that gives rural Chinese consumers a place to save their yuan. Most of these Chinese citizens had nowhere to store money before, as there were no banks in the village.”

However, it is Jack Ma’s (Chairman of Alibaba and Ant Financial) deep understanding of the role that technology platforms can and do play will have the most profound impact:

• Alibaba doesn’t do commerce, it just provides the platform (like UBER, Airbnb, and Facebook)
• The aim of their platforms is inclusion of their partners and members globally
• Made in China or India, etc. will be replaced by Made Internet.

Jack Ma says he is creating an economy. “We won’t own that economy. We will just govern it.”

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CTMfile take: The platform e-cosystems are already bigger than many banks and many economies. This is a game changer: Corporate treasurers how are you going to partner with and use the emerging ecosystems which are much more than just payment systems. (Chris’s blog is essential reading.)