JD.com Aggressively Expand into Fund Distribution following Douyin’s Sales Rumor

BEIJING, August 4 (TiPost)— JD.com, Chinese second largest e-commerce retailer next to Alibaba, is taking an aggressive step to throw its hat in a financial business that many tech titans had a tie to these years.

Credit：Visual China

JD.com’s application launched new business of fund investment earlier this week. By integrating an access to fund investment into the app, JD effectively started fund distribution at its online retail marketplace.  JD.com app users can see the new access at their profile page once he or she loges in. With a slogan “Come to JD for Investments in Funds” at the top, the page showcases not only mutual funds but a wide range of available investment products such as money market funds, fixed income securities, gold, equities, pension funds. The products are classified into different sections for investors who have specific goals. For instance, if a user is a conservative investor or a beginner, he or she can click into the sections for so-called stable wealth management, and if the user is a sophisticated one, advanced wealth management may be his or her choice.  

The arrangement and design of the fund sales page is made to help users know how to choose and make their orders as soon as possible. JD integrated derivative businesses like investment consulting into the page. It also created a special section called Fortune Account for a number of available fund managers like ChinaAMC, which has already had more than 650,000 followers at JD platform, as well as Taikang Online Property Insurance, Allianz Jingdong General Insurance and other insurance companies.

For a marketplace with a large amount of traffic like JD, forming a closed loop of wealth management with fund managers through Fortune Account and other means is a blue ocean that has huge potentials to explore, Chinese national financial newspaper the Securities Times commented. In an era of the internet economy, the high-traffic internet platform naturally has its own competitive advantage in sales, the paper cited a mutual fund insider. The paper expected platforms that obtained the fund sale license may become the winner.

Distributing funds used to be a very lucrative business for banks in China as the market was dominated by major state-owned banks. The landscape started changing in 2012, when the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) widened sales channels and began to issue licenses to third party fund sales companies. Alibaba’s fintech unit Ant Group is one of the first applicants that successfully obtained CSRC’s license to do fund distribution. Subsidiaries of other major internet companies like Baidu, JD.com, Sina were also approved as the qualified distributor since then.

JD’s move came days after Douyin was said to prepare for fund distribution. TikTok’s Chinese sister application recently carried out tests for fund sales participated by a few leading fund management companies, and talked with some companies about the possible business mode that can be adopted based on ecosystem of the popular short video app, reported digital Chinese news media outlet China Fund last week. The preparatory work for fund distribution has been done and Douyin is waiting for its sales qualification to be approved, the media outlet reported, adding that Douyin has already approached many mutual funds and reached agreements on distribution with these funds.

Any applicant for a fund sales license has to work with some fund companies to do tests for their application, and Douyin is conducting tests with major fund managers for sales preparation when TikTok sister has completed relevant technical adjustments, the report cited a person familiar with the matter. Various hardware and software preparations have been rushed out, including creating related business management systems, establishing a platform of the fund distribution system and completing the system development and training about business trials, the person added. Douyin was reported to plan to team up with fund managers for sales of money market funds initially, then gradually expand into sales of non- money market funds.

Douyin did not apply for a fund sales license nor did any tests with fund managers, people at the company told state-backed securities newspaper Securities Daily later. However, tapping into fund sales has become a trend for Chinese internet giants these years.  

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