Now most people in China do not pay by cash very often. We must thank a man for this convenience, and this man is Jack Ma. Jack Ma, or Ma Yun, is a Chinese business magnate, investor, politician, and philanthropist. He is the co-founder and former executive chairman of Alibaba Group, a multinational technology conglomerate. He is the founder of Alibaba, Taobao Marketplace and Alipay, which created a new era of Chinese economy.
Jack Ma was born Ma Yun on 10 September 1964 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China. He began studying English at a young age by conversing with English-speakers at Hangzhou International Hotel. For nine years, Ma would ride 17 miles on his bicycle to give tourists tours of the area to practice his English. He became pen pals with one of those foreigners, who nicknamed him "Jack" because he found it hard to pronounce his Chinese name.
Later in his youth, Ma struggled attending college. The Chinese entrance exams are held only once a year and Ma took four years to pass. Ma attended Hangzhou Teacher's Institute (currently known as Hangzhou Normal University) and graduated in 1988 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. While at school, Ma was head of the student council. After graduation, he became a lecturer in English and international trade at Hangzhou Dianzi University. He also applied ten times to Harvard Business School and got rejected each time.
In 1997, he helped build the official website and online marketplace for the China International Electronic Commerce Center, a department of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. In 1999, he quit from their job and returned to Hangzhou with his team to found Alibaba, a China-based business-to-business marketplace site in his apartment with a group of 18 friends. He started a new round of venture development with 500,000 yuan.
In October 1999 and January 2000, Alibaba twice won a total of a $25 million foreign venture capital investment. The program was expected to improve the domestic e-commerce market and perfect an e-commerce platform for Chinese enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to address World Trade Organization (WTO) challenges. Ma wanted to improve the global e-commerce system and from 2003 he secretly founded Taobao Marketplace, Alipay, Ali Mama and Lynx. After the rapid rise of Taobao, eBay offered to purchase the company. However, Ma rejected their offer, instead he gathered support from Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang with a $1 billion investment.
There are many interesting stories about Ma, but let’s focus on the founding of Alipay. Alipay is a third-party mobile and online payment platform, established in Hangzhou, China in February 2004 by Alibaba Group and its founder Jack Ma. It was first launched by Taobao in 2003 and was issued the first licensing regulations in June 2010 for third-party payment providers by the PBOC, China's central bank. To use Alipay to pay, you only need a smartphone with an Alipay app. You can scan QR codes or use the features in the app to buy almost anything, since most stores and online marketplaces in China support Alipay as a replacement of cards or cash. Internationally, more than 300 worldwide merchants use Alipay to sell directly to consumers in China. It currently supports transactions in 18 major foreign currencies. Since the launch of Alipay in the Mainland China, Ant Financial introduced a series of expansion of the services to other countries.
Alipay is conceptually similar to Apple Pay, WeChat Pay and PayPal because it overlays traditional card payment methods. Although users receive immediate notification of the transaction, the main difference among Alipay and an instant payment system, like Venmo or Zelle is that the funds transfer between counterparties is not immediate. The settlement time depends on the payment method chosen by the customer, while for instant payment systems, the funds are transferred within seconds or minutes.
Alipay, being one of the earliest mobile payment company, leads to a leap of Chinese e-commerce. It made mobile payment a lot easier and safer for all users, and with the help of Taobao and other online marketplaces, Chinese people no longer have to widely search for stores to buy something. Chinese people often refer Alipay, online shopping, shared bikes and high-speed railway as China’s new Four Inventions. Ma himself is also popular with people and was affectionally called Papa Ma. Now he is retired, but that didn’t change the important place in everyone’s heart.