Alipay has reached a partnership deal with China Everbright Bank on fintech development, cracking one more member from the so-called "anti-Alibaba league" of state banks.
When talking about e-payment, most people in China would think of Alipay instead of bank services. And the big state banks are not happy with the situation.
They hired more technical staff in order to build their own online services and win users back, but not many people are satisfied with the experience.
Now more and more banks have given up. They have stopped taking Alipay as an enemy and instead, started seeking cooperation, with Everbright the latest to do so.
The two companies, along with Everbright's tech subsidiary, announced the cooperation on Wednesday, which includes building "cloud platforms, scalable open financial architecture, internet finance architecture and mobile architecture," according to the statement released by Ant Financial, Alipay's owner.
Alipay seems very open on such kind of partnership, as the firm's CEO Eric Jing said, "for us, the only criterion as to whom we partner with is whether that partnership is innovative enough to deliver value to users."
"Fintech is becoming core competence for financial institutions in the pursuit of transformation and innovation," said Everbright, which will also build an fintech innovation lab with Alipay.
AI, risk management and biometric verification are also areas of cooperation between the two sides.
Ant Financial is affiliated to e-commerce empire Alibaba ran by Jack Ma, who promised in 2008 that "if the banks won't change themselves, we will help them do it."
Now the promise is slowly coming true.
Everbright is not the first state bank shaking hands with Alipay. The China Construction Bank (CCB) also reached fintech cooperation with Ant Financial in May 2017. Alipay's tech is now being used by CCB to boost online credit card issuance and many other services.
Also, Alipay is not the only internet giant Everbright is partnering with. On Thursday, the bank also signed agreement with Tencent, the owner of Alipay's archenemy WeChat Pay, to establish another fintech innovation lab. The lab's mission is also to develop a cloud service and other big data applications.
By Gong Zhe
