Four-hundred million people. Or five times the population of Germany – the most populous country that lies entirely within Europe. That is the user base of Alipay, the online payments service offered by Ant Financial, the financial affiliate of Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba.
This offers but a glimpse of the scale of China’s fintech sector, which has ballooned in the past five years and has in some ways already left the tech giants of the West behind.
