Legend-owned third-party payment platform raises $242m

Taoran Sun, CEO and chairman of Lakala, said in an internal email that investors in the firm include Taiping Life Insurance, China Reinsurance, China Continent Property & Casualty Insurance and the Civil Aviation Development Fund. They have a combined 13.9% interest.

Founded in 2005, Lakala claims to be one of the earliest third-party payment service providers licensed by China's central bank. It provides supplies terminals used by convenience stores, supermarkets and shopping malls operators to facilitate offline transactions. The company has also launched a number of patented personal payment devices, such as mobile card payment device, to allow consumers to pay their bills.

Over the last two years, Lakala has expanded into other financial segments, covering online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending and wealth management on an online-to-offline (O2O) basis.

It has over 75,000 self-service terminal devices in over 300 cities. More than 100 million consumers and about three million merchants are using its payment services, Sun said. He expects the company's online lending to reach RMB30 billion this year, while the scale of wealth management product offerings will hit RMB10 billion.

Legend Holdings, sponsor of China-focused GPs Hony Capital and Legend Capital, is currently on the course to raise as much as HK$15.2 billion ($1.96 billion) through its Hong Kong IPO.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Financials
• Venture
• Expansion
• Financial Services
• TMT
• Technology
• insurance
• Growth capital
• China