Last week, a very big deal went down in the world of payments. China's behemoth Ant Financial (an affiliate of Alibaba Group) with a market valuation of $60 Billion (with a "b") acquired MoneyGram, the second largest global remittance firm on the planet (after Western Union). Ant Financial has a massive footprint in China, but not so much outside of their native homeland That's about to change with this acquisition, and when the company goes public later this year, it will no doubt make the IPO more appealing to have this diversified offering and an American presence.
"......Ant Financial is as an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, is the parent company to Alipay, is currently valued at $60 billion and is headed toward an IPO sometime later this year, according to experts. By all accounts, it’s gotten very serious about its global expansion, particularly in the United States. Thus, the MoneyGram buy.
And this is a big step for two firms that might have just partnered instead of merged. But as MoneyGram CEO Alex Holmes told Karen Webster in a conversation shortly after the news of the acquisition broke, the larger ambitions of both firms were better served as a single firm.
“As a public company and as a CEO, it is my job to take any discussion seriously that has the potential to benefit the shareholder of the organization. So, we entertain anything coming in that would be of value,” Holmes told Webster, noting that most other such conversations never got much past the “initial chat” because that bigger value wasn’t there."
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