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| Illustration: Barry Downard |
Lufax is the unacknowledged dynamo of Chinese internet banking. BAT – Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent – get all the press as they convert e-commerce and social media businesses into emergent financial service enterprises with customer bases the size of continents. But Lufax, which is preparing what could be Hong Kong’s biggest IPO of the year, is in some ways the most interesting of them all.
Founded in 2011, Lufax – known locally as Lujiazui, or in full, Shanghai Lujiazui International Financial Asset Exchange – started out as a peer-to-peer lender. That is not unusual. As many as 3,000 P2P businesses were operational in China by 2015, although many have since vanished or collapsed.
But Lufax had two distinguishing features: the backing of the Ping An group and a great deal of ambition.
Six years on, it has expanded to become a large wealth management, consumer finance and institutional trading business, with 25.5 million registered users, Rmb390.92 billion ($57 billion) of retail assets and Rmb111.65 billion of loans under management. As is the way of Chinese internet finance business, its growth numbers border on the absurd.
