Ant Financial plans Round B fund raising to fund expansion

Ant Financial Services, the finance arm of Alibaba, plans to raise funds ahead of a planned IPO. The Round B funding, which comes just six months after its first major private placement in July 2015, is expected to reach at least $1.5bn. This move comes as technology firms look to raise cash to fund expansion, as China’s growing affluent middle class seeks online banking and investing solutions. As we reported yesterday, a new wave of apps are emerging in China giving the growing affluent access to US markets, an attractive proposition as the yuan declines. We also note that Paytm, in which Alibaba and Ant Financial are share holders, has acquired Shifu, a contact-aware personal assistant app that mines the usage patterns of smartphone users and makes personal and relevant recommendations, which has the potential to be utilised in their plans to expand digital wealth management services in China.
 

NEW DELHI: Paytm has acquired Shifu for $8 million (about Rs 53.2 crore), a move that will enable the digital payments company to offer more personalised user experience.Shifu, a context-aware personal assistant application, mines the smartphone usage patterns of users and makes personalised and highly relevant recommendations to them."Through the acquisition, Paytm aims to leverage the tech infrastructure of Shifu to enrich the customer experience it offers to its users. The 20-member team behind Shifu has also come on board across various verticals at Paytm," Paytm said in a statement today.By integrating Shifu's technology and behavioural modelling with Paytm app, Paytm Senior Vice President Kiran Vasireddy said, "we will be able to offer a highly intuitive and personalised experience to our users"."This acquisition will give further impetus to our focus on Artificial intelligence which will bring the next wave of disruption in ecommerce," Vasireddy said.By predicting user behaviour based on past usage, location and other data points, Paytm's platform will be able to offer relevant recommendations to our users, he added.Shifu, created by Delhi-based The Signals, is a free task-managing app. Once the app is installed, it analyses the usage patterns of the device owner and give various suggestions based on a predictive algorithm.While the app will continue to be available in its original form after the acquisition, the technology behind it will be used by Paytm.Paytm has a user base of more than 100 million people.In November, Paytm acquired home service marketplace Near.in for an undisclosed amount to boost online-to-offline (O2O) play.