Chinese firms Ant Financial, which is a payment affiliate of the Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA), announced “the launch of their first blockchain-based electronic wallet cross border remittance service, and completed the first remittance.”
Why it is important
- Ant Financial believes that the integration of AlipayHK's blockchain service with the Gcash payment service will enable foreigners living in Hong Kong, for example Filipinos, not to contact intermediaries and transfer money within "seconds".
- This step signals the extensive integration of blockchain technology by the giant e-commerce AliPay. The banking sector of the Philippines is also actively developing solutions with the use of a distributed ledger technology for the industry. Last week a pilot project was launched with IBM for remittances to Japan.
The first users voiced their satisfaction as AliPayHK from Hong Kong and the Philippine payment company GCash only took three seconds to process the payment.
Jack Ma: “Using blockchain to achieve cross-border remittances is one of my most concerned projects in the past six months. Starting from Hong Kong, this service (AlipayHK) will be brought to the rest of the world in the future,” the founder of Alibaba Group Jack Ma commented on the innovation.
Earlier, Ant Financial raised approximately $14 billion through Series C funding. Funds collected by a group of private investors would be directed towards advancing technological innovations and most notably, blockchain development.
By Ekaterina Ulyanova