Now it appears to be turning into the kind of highly regulated Chinese bank that it hoped to supplant. Ant declined to comment on those reports earlier this month, and the details of any potential agreement were not immediately clear. While the company was largely able to grow unchecked over the past decade, the political winds in Beijing are changing. A pedestrian walks past an Alipay sign outside an Ant Group Co. office building in Shanghai, China, on Thursday, Dec. 24, 2020. "For a tech company that needs constantly [to] innovate, such regulations will pose extremely big pressure," he wrote.

Source: CNN February 20, 2021 00:00 UTC