Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma is the leader of an army. The Ant Army. By connecting businesses all over the world to Chinese suppliers via Alibaba platforms, Ma has enabled what he calls the ‘ant army’ of Chinese manufacturers.

The Ant Army uses Alipay, which in 2014 was separated from Alibaba Group to make Ant Financial. Super new and a bit secretive, Ant Financial is revolutionizing the game with a bevy of online banking services, nimbly filling niches that the Chinese banking sector hasn’t been able to. Using rhetoric of building an open financial ecosystem, Ant Financial has created one of the world’s largest money-market funds, offers peer-to-peer lending for Chinese SMEs, and has micro-financed more than 20 million rural merchants last year. And to round out individual services, Chinese regulators just green-lit the creation of MYBank, an all digital, branchless bank. In other words, you never have to go to the bank again!

If the ‘ants’ bank by using ‘online ERRTHING’ what happens to Chinese banking as we know it? Sindicator takes a look at the 270 million-strong Ant Army and its booming financier Ant Financial, valued at over $30 billion.

Want to try your hand at e-banking in China? Zhifu me to support further Sindicator installments.