Chinese regulators approved Jack Ma’s Ant Group to begin operating a new consumer finance company, in the first concrete sign of an easing of tensions with Beijing after Ant agreed to a “rectification” deal in April.
The unit will become the centrepiece of Ant’s restructured lending business, which had grown so large that it issued about one-tenth of China’s non-mortgage consumer loans last year through its Alipay app.
But the massive business caught financial regulators off guard when its scale was first revealed in the prospectus for Ant’s $37bn initial public offering, and has been a focus of authorities’ scrutiny since they suspended Ant’s listing last November.