Alipay is the 800-pound gorilla in the global fintech room. It processed more than US$38 billion of payments in a single day.

Alipay’s global fintech supremacy is without question. On the highly-anticipated Singles Day in China, Alipay processed all the online payments emanating from Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms.

Singles Day, which is held every year on November 11, (11/11), was launched by Alibaba in 2009. On that first Singles Day, only 27 merchants participated. However, fast forward a decade to 2019, and Singles Day has become the biggest shopping day globally. Over 200,000 brands took part in this year’s Singles Day.

Alipay and Alibaba

Alibaba broke all records this time with a tally of USD 38,379,306,366 transacted this Singles Day. Alibaba marketplaces were Lazada, AliExpress, Kaola, and New Retail and consumer services platforms. However, this enormous pipeline of transactions ran through Alipay’s payment platform – a testimony to its technological muscle.

On Singles Day Alipay processed $1 billion in a mere 68 seconds, and in the first hour, racked up $12 billion payments.

Alibaba Chief Technology Officer Jeff Zhang, therefore, described 11.11 as an “airplane flying at turbo speed.”

There have been rumors that the Chinese government would use Singles Day to launch its native China coin digital currency. These proved unfounded, however.

Alipay is a part of Ant Financial. As of January 2019, Ant Financial, JVs included, served over a billion users globally.

In March this year Ant Financial announced its launch of a “distributed core banking platform,”  a next-generation banking product.

Meanwhile, other technological innovations underway at Ant include the blockchain and AI.

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