Suning Finance (Finance SN) (苏宁金融) is the financial services vehicle of Nanjing-headquartered Chinese retail giant Suning.com Co., Ltd.
The company bills itself as “China’s financial offline-to-offline (O2O) leader,” providing a range of services including payments services, wealth management products, insurance, consumer loans, enterprise loans and crowd-funding.
Suning Finance has sought to position itself in the financial inclusion space, focusing on the provision of financial services to the general public and capitalising on the huge volume of people who use its parent company’s e-commerce platform.
Data from the company indicates that its membership breached the 10 million threshold in 2016, while total transaction value exceeded 400 billion yuan, for an increase of more than 100% compared to the previous year.
Suning Finance has established at least 39 “household wealth centres” across China in a total of 28 key cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, Shenyang, Xi’an, Shenzhen and Dalian.
The company plans to increase this number to 175 in total, covering at least 80% of China’s second and third-tier cities.
The household wealth centres provide in-person wealth management advisory services to clients, with an average wealth management subscription value of over 50,000 yuan, and a maximum single investment amount of more than 5 million yuan.
The “Yifubao” (易付宝) payments platform lies at the core of Suning’s account management system, which uses big data and risk control technology to provide users with a broad range of financial services including payments, wealth management, consumer loans, enterprise loans, insurance, crowd-funding and savings cards.
Suning Finance featured on the Hurun China New Finance Top 50 List (胡润中国新金融50强) for both 2016 and 2017.
Total disclosed funding for Suning Finance stood at USD$814 million as of December 2017, with key investors including Everbright, GP Capital, IDG Capital, Macrolink Group and Shenzhen Capital Group.