Jack Ma’s money market fund has raised $90 billion in just ten months, posing a threat to the country’s banks and challenging its regulators.
Working out of a cramped 600-square-foot apartment in Beijing’s Chaoyang central business district, Jack Wang leads a team of ten customer service representatives for Qishi Club Co., an online toy seller. Each month his company racks up more than 150,000 yuan ($24,000) in sales from Alibaba Group Holding’s e-commerce platform, Taobao.com, which is the eBay of China. In the past Wang would withdraw all of the funds from Alipay, the group’s payment service, and put the money in his bank, where he can earn interest ranging from 35 basis points on demand deposits to a maximum of 3.3 percent on a one-year term deposit. Since early this year, however, he has been transferring the revenue to Yu’e Bao,
