Alibaba, Ant Financial invest jointly in local business

Alibaba Group and its affiliate Ant Financial will invest nearly $1 billion in a joint venture that they can tap China's fast-growing local services market, focusing at first on food delivery. Local services, also known as online-to-offline (O2O), have been booming in China, with some of the country's most valuable startups operating in this area. Apart from calling cabs, these apps link smartphone users with offline businesses to offer things like delivery and nearby food and leisure deals.

"The joint venture, Koubei, will integrate the convenient aspects of mobile commerce and big data to transform and upgrade China's local services sector," Alibaba and Ant Financial said in a statement. 
Koubei will initially focus on food and beverages, with Alibaba's food ordering and delivery business, Taodiandian, and Ant Financial's offline merchant resources becoming a core part of Koubei's operations. Over time, Ant Financial's merchant services in offline retail, healthcare and vending machines will be rolled into the joint venture, it said.

Ant Financial Services Group is controlled by Alibaba's Executive Chairman Jack Ma and other senior Alibaba executives. It runs China's most popular online payment platform, Alipay, and one of the country's biggest money market funds, Yu'e Bao. It will launch an online-only bank dubbed MYbank.