For Around $700M Alibaba’s Ant Financial Buys UK Currency Exchange Giant WorldFirst 

Alibaba Presents Alipay And Ant Financial

Making its first big move into Europe is Ant Financial the financial services including remittances, behemoth affiliated with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba acquiring London headquartered payments company WorldFirst in a deal where sources explain it is valued at around $700 million. 

This multi-hundred multi-dollar acquisition isn’t the average acquisition where the deal was confirmed by WorldFirst in a note to customers as Alibaba hasn’t curiously put out an official press release acknowledging the acquisition through a spokesperson. 

The deal has potentially significant consequences despite a relatively under-the-radar outing that underscores the strong market connections between China and Europe whereas the margin pressures with many smaller remittance companies that are under in the wake of larger companies like Amazon building the money moving services along with competition from local players in Asia. 

The 15-year-old WorldFirst is one of several globally active money remittance services letting businesses and consumers moving money between countries at prices lower than regular banks. 

Claiming to have transferred over £70 billion ($90 billion) for customers since 2004, the company comes with more than one million transfers made each year. Being a player in the competitive remittance market is WorldFirst where migrant workers send money home to the family making transfers online or in person at WorldFirst outlets. 

The Renowned Financial Service Of Alibaba

Best known for its Alipay service, Ant Financial is China’s dominant mobile payment app coming with over 550 million registered users as Alibaba owns one-third of Ant valued at as much as $ 150 billion and seen to be pushing to expand its empire outside of China and beyond the Asia Pacific too.

Being financed by private equity investors, WorldFirst as a private company keeping the financial details closely held as noted the transfer of more than $ 95 billion for some 160,000 customers including businesses and individuals. 

According to an executive close to the remittances space the whole sector of payments from the West to China sellers for e-commerce comes under massive margin pressure from Amazon going direct with is service plus new China-based entrants PingPong, LianLian, and Airwallex. Recently seen low WorldFirst has declining growth because of this were another source explained it had been shopping itself around. 

It is in this context that the acquisition has given Ant Financial a massive international boost as it is for the first time a significant profile in Europe having a modest presence where it comes amid some stumbles for the company in other attempts to expand internationally. 

The New Acquisitions For Ant Financial 

The company has notably agreed to acquire Nasdaq listed MoneyGram for $1.2 billion, winning a bidding war for global payment company as ultimately the deal was blocked by the US government. Ant, therefore, went on to raise an enormous $ 14 billion funding round bruised by the episode setting the plans back by a year during the time it presumably kicked off the search for the Money Gram alternative. 

As it comes to be based out of UK the WorldFirst last year made a key move to expand its US operations and announcing that it would acquire the retail money transfer business of San Francisco based start-up Wyre building the network on blockchain technology selling it to focus on the other side of the business providing currency exchange APIs to larger B2B customers. 

To move deeper in the US it looked like all systems go for WorldFirst whereas the company plans to close the US-based business moving to have made to prevent a repeat of that scuppered MoneyGram acquisition. 

Ant Financial has aggressively expanded its presence in Asia outside of US and China through a series of investment deals that have seen it put $200 million into Kakao Pay in Korea finding similar deals in Southeast Asia, where the overall strategy appears to be to replicate the success of Alipay in China offering mobile payments, remittances and digital financial services covering loans, banking and wealth management.

Finally, Alipay announced the deal to bring its payment option to US Walgreens stores in a show of the global ambition with a previous partnership with point-of-sale company First Data adding Alipay to four million retail partners Stateside as the company has similar deals in Europe and parts of Asia. 

Closing Down The Discussion

Here we end the report on the acquisitions made by Ant Financial as they come to be the best mode of money transaction for the US as well as the Asia Pacific. The details are quite promising as it helps the remittances to be made without any complexities.