Alipay's legal person was changed to Han Xinyi
Alipay, which is about to turn 20 years old, has a new "head".
Recently, Tianyancha showed that the legal representative of Alipay (China) Network Technology Co., Ltd. has been changed from Ni Xingjun to Han Xinyi.
Source: Tianyancha
You must know that a month before Han Xinyi took over Alipay, he had been appointed as the president of Ant Group, reporting directly to Jing Xiandong, chairman and CEO of Ant Group.
At that time, Alipay said that the adjustment continued Ant's strategy of changing the organizational formation for the market and promoting the rejuvenation of the management team, which was a planned arrangement for organizational upgrading and would further stimulate the vitality of the organization.
It is understood that after taking office, Han Xinyi will focus on the "Alipay double flywheel" strategy, that is, the two-wheel drive of payment business and Internet business, focusing on forming a new business ecology through content and digitalization, and using new technologies to create a better experience for users.
For Alipay, this change of leadership may inject new vitality into its commercialization and open a new stage of development.
Speaking of this, many people can't help but have a question in their hearts: Who is Han Xinyi, and why is he?
After graduating from Tsinghua University, he chose to join CICC, and served as a senior manager and director in the investment banking department, accumulating rich experience in finance and investment.
Source: Ant Group's official website
In 2011, Han joined Alibaba Group as Senior Director of Corporate Finance. During this period, he was deeply involved in the privatization of Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed company and the restructuring between Alibaba and Ant Financial.
In 2014, Han joined Ant Group as a senior director of the investment department, was promoted to chief financial officer (CFO) in 2020, and joined the board of directors as an executive director in January 2023.
Until his promotion to president, Han Xinyi has been deeply involved in all aspects of the company's business and provided strong support for Ant Group's strategic decision-making.
It is worth noting that 2024 coincides with the milestone of Alipay's 20th anniversary, and Ant Group chose to change its leadership in this special year, revealing its greater ambitions and more comprehensive development plans.
The editor-in-chief believes that the change of leadership is not only based on the full trust and expectation of the new president Han Xinyi within the group, but also reflects the great importance attached to the commercialization of Alipay.
Perhaps under the leadership of Han Xinyi, the commercialization of Alipay will enter a new stage of development.
In fact, looking back at the commercialization process of Alipay, it is not difficult to find that its pace has accelerated significantly in the past two or three years.
In March 2023, Ant Group's Alipay business group underwent organizational structure and personnel adjustments, including the establishment of a new advertising division.
In August of the same year, Alipay launched the commercial promotion platform "Lights", marking its full entry into the era of commercialization.
Three months later, Alipay's life account fully opened the UGC entrance, supporting individual users to edit and publish short video content in the app, which not only enriched the platform's content ecology, but also improved user participation and activity, making it an important step on the road to commercialization.
At the beginning of this year, Alipay once again made efforts at the content level, adding a new "interest community" entrance at the top of the APP message page. After clicking in, users can discover a variety of interest groups, covering cycling, hiking, camping and other fields, providing users with a more diversified and personalized content experience.
Under the active promotion of Alipay, its commercialization has achieved remarkable results.
According to the "Alipay Platform Business Vitality Report", in the past year, Alipay's deliverable traffic has doubled. At the same time, the "Lights" platform has also shown a strong growth momentum since its launch, with the number of active advertisers and active agents increasing by 4 times and 9 times respectively.
Source: Alipay
In addition, through advertising, the GMV of the brand's Mini Program increased by up to 200% on average.
These data send a strong signal to the outside world: Alipay's commercialization has achieved tangible results, and its strong commercial vitality and potential are emerging.
Combined with the major decision of this change of leadership, Alipay will obviously continue to make great progress on the road of commercialization. As for the specific measures that will be taken next, we still need the market's continued attention and expectations.
Alipay is commercialized and is still in the exploratory period
In addition to the content strategy mentioned above, Alipay's digital strategy is also an important driving force for its commercialization.
As far as the AI field is concerned, Alipay has made great efforts.
From the Hangzhou Asian Games to the Spring Festival Wufu Festival, Alipay has used a lot of AI technology to launch many innovative, exciting and creative activities for users.
For example, through the implementation of 100 million digital torchbearers around the world to carry out AI marketing, the traditional "Five Blessings" activity has been upgraded to a grand "Five Blessings Festival", and AI games such as "electronic wealth picking", "digital fireworks", "AI looking for blessings", "AI red envelopes", and "AI taking family photos" have been cleverly integrated, bringing users an unprecedented interactive experience.
Source: CCTV News
These AI gameplay methods have attracted the attention of a large number of merchants. According to the data, in Alipay's Spring Festival "Five Blessings" AI marketing campaign, nearly 40,000 merchants also participated in the issuance of 100 million-level Fu cards to attract traffic to their products and services.
From the in-depth layout of content to the comprehensive upgrade of digitalization, Alipay seems to have gradually completed the gorgeous transformation from a single tool-based product to a comprehensive digital life service platform, and the current commercialization has entered a critical period of development.
However, despite the remarkable progress made, Alipay still faces insurmountable gaps and challenges in some aspects, which is an inescapable fact.
A set of data shows that during the Spring Festival in 2023, for apps with daily active users exceeding 50 million, Alipay's average daily usage time is only 7.8 minutes, ranking last on the list.
图源:QuestMobile
In comparison, Honor of Kings topped the list with a staggering 153 minutes, followed by Bilibili with 106.6 minutes, and Douyin Express and Toutiao also topped the list with 102.7 minutes and 77 minutes, respectively.
The most exaggerated thing is that even Baidu Maps, which focuses on navigation functions, has far more time spent per capita than Alipay in a single day.
As a leader in the field of payment, Alipay has more than one billion users, which can be said to be unique among the same tool apps.
But even so, its user time is not as long as that of game apps and content apps, as well as some utility apps. Such a performance can't help but make people feel a little worried about Alipay's commercialization prospects.
At present, it seems that the commercialization of Alipay is still in the exploratory period. What kind of outcome will be achieved in the end is still an open question.
The commercialization of tool products is difficult
Of course, the commercialization of tool products is destined to be a challenging and arduous journey, and such a dilemma is not unique to Alipay.
Taking the "Internet artifact" WiFi master key as an example, data shows that since the App was launched in 2012, it has quickly accumulated 900 million users around the world in just four years, and its user scale is second only to WeChat and QQ.
After having a large number of users, WiFi Master Key began to insert a large number of pop-up advertisements in the App, including vulgar edge rubbing, gambling and online loan advertisements, which caused a large number of users to be dissatisfied and disgusted.
Source: WiFi Master Key App
Gradually, the loss of users of WiFi Master Key is becoming more and more serious.
To make matters worse, WiFi Master Key was also criticized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology for allegedly collecting user privacy, and then major mobile app stores removed it from the shelves.
This series of negative events has dealt a serious blow to WiFi Master Key's reputation and user base, causing the number of its users to plummet in just a few years, falling to 300 million as of 2020.
Today, WiFi Master Key is no longer in the limelight, and you can only rely on side hustles to stay afloat. This negative case also tells us that if tool-based products want to succeed on the road to commercialization, they must not be impatient.
Especially for Alipay, the key to the success of commercialization lies in how to retain the hearts of users through high-quality content, leaving little time for it to explore commercialization, and every step in its next step needs to be more cautious in order to achieve a breakthrough in commercialization in a limited time.
In short, there are difficulties in the commercialization of tool products, and there are only many challenges ahead. If 20-year-old Alipay wants to make more money, it also needs to constantly polish the content and change the inherent impression of users.
Author | Li Xiang