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Banks have made "soft pitches" to help Ant raise funds, most
likely through loans, to be used by the company for acquisitions
such as that of MoneyGram International Inc as well as for
boosting existing investments, the person said.
Ant, an affiliate of online shopping giant Alibaba Group,
dominates China's online payment market, but has been ramping up
investment overseas amid fierce rivalry at home with peers like
Tencent Holdings Ltd's popular WeChat Pay.
"It is the market practice for a globalized company like Ant
Financial to raise debt in U.S. dollars," a representative of
Ant Financial told Reuters, but gave no further details.
Ant, valued at about $60 billion after a $4.5 billion funding
round last April, is set for an initial public offering (IPO),
though the firm has not specified a timeframe or listing venue.
With 450 million users of its Alipay payment service, Ant is
making a concerted push to expand its presence overseas.
Last month, the firm said it would acquire U.S. money-transfer
company MoneyGram for about $880 million. It has also invested
in Indian mobile payment and e-commerce website Paytm and Thai
financial technology firm Ascend Money.
Ant's move to raise funds via debt, instead of selling equity as
most Chinese tech firms have done in the past, is due to
favorable interest rates for bank loans, the source with direct
knowledge of the matter said, declining to be named as the talks
were not yet public.
Technology news website, The Information, earlier reported that
Ant was looking to raise more than $3 billion, citing a person
familiar with the matter.
Ant is controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma.
Last year, in three separate loan deals, Chinese Internet giants
Alibaba, Baidu Inc and Tencent raised a combined $10.4 billion,
according to Thomson Reuters LPC data.
Tencent also raised $3.5 billion in bank loans in October to
fund its acquisition of Supercell, the Finnish maker of hit game
'Clash of Clans'.
(Reporting by Sumeet Chatterjee and Sijia Jiang, additional
reporting by Prakash Chakravarti, writing by Adam Jourdan;
Editing by Himani Sarkar)
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