China’s Ant Financial Partners With CIMB Subsidiary In Malaysia

China’s Ant Financial is targeting the Malaysian market by forming a mobile wallet joint venture with a subsidiary of local bank CIMB.

Finextra reported news that Ant Financial will hold a minority stake in the equity JV with CIMB’s Touch ‘n Go unit, which provides cards to millions of Malaysians for payments at toll roads, public transportation systems, parking and retailers.

Through Ant’s Alipay unit, this new venture will bring mobile payments, as well as other FS services such as eCommerce through mobile wallets and other methods of online payments, to Malaysia’s Touch ‘n Go users.

“TNG’s leading position, combined with Ant Financial’s Alipay capabilities, will allow all Malaysians to participate and access secure payments and digital financial services for the long term,” said Tengku Dato’ Sri Zafrul Aziz, CEO, CIMB.

Ant Financial, which is the financial arm of Alibaba, specializes in wealth management. It nearly doubled its profit during its 2017 fiscal year, in part because of its mobile payments feature, Alipay, the popular online payments service in China. In addition to this recent partnership, Ant Financial is in the process of acquiring MoneyGram in the U.S. and has been branching outside China to places such as India and South Korea.

Malaysia is the first country to join the Electronic World Trade Platform, a program initiated by Alibaba Group Founder Jack Ma to help SMEs expand their trading capabilities worldwide.

“To bring digital financial inclusion to more people across the world, Ant Financial takes an approach of collaborating with strategic partners overseas and enabling them with its innovative solutions,” said Eric Jing, CEO, Ant Financial. “Given TNG’s leading position in the market and vast customer base, we believe that we can help it to offer exciting and innovative products to Malaysian consumers.”