Taobao opens China's first e-commerce funds platform

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group took a major step into Internet finance on Friday by starting funds sales on its popular online shopping platform Taobao.

Taobao, China's leading online retail platform, received a no-action letter from the China Securities Regulatory Commission on Thursday for its funds business, according to the Alibaba Group.

That makes it China's first Internet company to provide services for funds sales institutions.

Alipay, also run by Alibaba, will provide third-party payment services for the online funds sales.

On Friday, the first batch of 17 funds institutions, including Guotai AMC, E Fund and Aegon-Industrial Fund, opened their online funds shops on Taobao.

Persons aged 18 or above can buy funds after passing the real name authentication through the Alipay online payment service.

These funds shops will provide a one-stop service for buyers to open accounts, place and pay for orders, as well as manage their fund accounts, "similar to online clothes shopping," said the Alibaba Group.

As the provider of the funds sales, the funds institutions will also offer consulting and other services for online buyers.

Taobao has introduced risk appetite classifications to serve customers based on large-scale data analysis. Beginners in money management will get reminders about risks.

Beside these risk notifications, Taobao has also set order amount limits of 2,000 yuan (about 328.2 U.S. dollars) for each equity fund, including stock funds, hybrid funds, QDII funds and index funds.

"Taobao is an easy-to-use platform for customers to buy funds, with no hard financial terms or complicated procedures," said Yuan Leiming, general manager of the financing department of the Alibaba Microfinance Service Group. "We are expecting to provide more convenience for ordinary people to manage their money by means of the burgeoning Internet finance market."

Three Chinese Internet giants -- Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu -- have raced into Internet finance in 2013. And low-barrier online financial products have become their brand products.

Online funds sales mark the second major step for Alibaba after establishing a new business offering customers higher investment yields than interest from banks.

In mid-June, Alipay started to offer netizens the option to directly invest with the private TIANHONG Fund using spare cash from Alipay accounts.

To date, the fund has accumulated an asset size of 55.6 billion yuan(about 9.12 billion U.S. dollars), the largest single fund in China.

Alibaba saw transactions made on Taobao and Tmall, its two customer-to-customer and business-to-customer websites, exceed 1 trillion yuan (162 billion U.S. dollars) last year.