Ant Group’s Hong Kong virtual bank officially opens in the region

By Edil Corneille

Ant Bank Hong Kong, a subsidiary of China’s Ant Group, announced its official opening to provide banking services to Hong Kong citizens. The neobank is one of the 8 virtual banks in Hong Kong where these kinds of banks do not have physical branches and they focus on the customer’s requirements of digital banking.

Individuals can now download the bank’s mobile application. With only a Hong Kong permanent resident identity card, it takes as long as 3 minutes to successfully open an account. Banking services are available 24 hours a day and seven days a week. These comprise of local transfers and ‘Treasure Deposit’ current savings deposits with an annual interest rate of up to 2.5 per cent.

Ant Bank, in the short term, will cooperate with the local e-wallet AlipayHK to integrate banking services with the residents’ diverse life scenarios such as clothing, food, housing, transportation, consumer entertainment, etc.

Wang Lan, Chief Executive Officer of Ant Bank (Hong Kong) enthused, “I am very pleased that Ant Bank (Hong Kong) officially opened today and is providing new, inclusive and reliable products and services to the people of Hong Kong. It is a great honor for the general public to serve the public. The original intention of the bank was to provide citizens with new choices with increasingly mature financial technology products and services, and to contribute to the long-term development of Hong Kong’s inclusive finance.”

Over 2 million AlipayHK users can open an account with Ant Bank. The virtual bank hopes to promote inclusive financial services in Hong Kong through this cooperation.

Ant Bank will also use its own advantages in technological innovation to serve local SMEs. In order to fulfil the mission of “making the world easy to do business”, it is studying different solutions, hoping to use e-commerce in the Alibaba economy as the first phase of the pilot for SME users. The bank is involved in the research and development of digital trade financing.

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