Suning to join finance trend

Suning.com, the e-commerce platform of Suning Commerce Group Co, confirmed with the Global Times Wednesday that it plans to launch financing products, joining a recent wave of Internet companies such as Alibaba Group which have been showing unprecedented enthusiasm for online financial businesses.

"We have been preparing online financing products for a period of time," Chen Gongjing, deputy manager of the marketing department at suning.com, told the Global Times Wednesday, without disclosing more details.

Suning has been expanding its ­online financial businesses since it received its third-party payment ­license from the People's Bank of China in June 2012.

Its online third-party payment platform Yifubao has so far initiated cooperation with 17 domestic banks including the Big Four banks, ­following other payment tools like ­Alibaba's Alipay, the country's biggest third-party online payment platform by transaction value.

"Suning.com has an advantage in launching financing products as it has its own third-party payment platform (Yifubao). like Alibaba," Wang Tingting, an industry analyst from Internet service consultancy iResearch, told the Global Times Wednesday.

Suning.com is not the only company to set its sights on the online financial sector. Yu'ebao, China's first fund investment platform for online shoppers, came online under Alibaba on June 13. Its investment value hit 6 billion yuan within half a month.

Media reported Tuesday that Tencent Holdings, a leading Internet and mobile phone services provider, is co-launching an online securities brokerage agency with Great Wall Securities.

Hu Chunnan, director of the public relations department at Tencent, declined to comment.

"Online financial businesses could help these Internet companies to diversify their daily services for consumers and accumulate more ­users," Wang of iResearch said.

"The traditional financial sector will confront more serious competition as Internet companies flood into the online financial sector," Ding ­Jianping, a professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, told the Global Times Wednesday.

"The new form of business also imposes challenges for the country's regulators due to a 'supervision vacuum' in this sector," Ding noted.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission sent a statement to Alipay on July 23, claiming that the company had failed to file all the required settlement accounts for fund sales and urging the company to complete the procedures as quickly as possible.

Central government agencies including the central bank and the ­China Banking Regulatory Commission have started research into the supervision of enterprises with Internet financial businesses, the Shanghai Securities News reported Wednesday.