Whether it is TMD or BAT, financial services have great appeal to them.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “New Knowledge of Science and Technology” (ID: kejixinzhi), author : Wei Yuqi, Editor: Han Qing.
October 8, Dida Travel formally submitted a listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, according to the prospectus data It shows that Tide is already the number one player in the downwind market, with a market share of 66.5%. Along with Tick’s first step, Didi’s new trends have also become the focus of attention.
Almost at the same time, Didi launched the “Flower Little Pig” aimed at the sinking market, and announced high-profile goals for the next three years, as well as no upper limit on investment in community group buying business. Compared with the previous high-profile actions, Didi’s other action has a significantly lower focus, and this is its financial business.
From the launch of auto insurance in 2015 to the recent grayscale test of “Didi Monthly Payment”, these all show that Didi has not given up its financial business. Didi has high expectations for finance internally. This can be seen from the codename of the financial sector in Didi, which was given the codename “Manhattan” with the same name as the US atomic bomb research project.
However, the external environment of Didi’s “Manhattan Project” is even worse. It has to face not only WeChat and Alipay, more and more Internet giant Have noticed the value of financial services, Meituan,Companies such as Pinduoduo and ByteDance have more or less entered the financial industry.
This not only makes Didi’s financial business unclear, but also makes the financial business another intersection between the two generations of Internet giants.
01 Low-key Didi Finance
Although Didi has many rivals in the ride-hailing industry, it is a fact that no one can shake its position. Compared with this, Didi’s financial performance is somewhat unsatisfactory.
Yiben Finance reported in November this year that Didi Financial employees once revealed that Di Finance’s in Loan balance is less than 20 billion”, and its 2017 GMV reached 250 -27 billion U.S. dollars (approximately 150 billion to 162 billion yuan), it can be seen that even after three years of development, the volume of Didi’s financial business still does not match the scale of transactions.
More intuitively, if revenue is the yardstick, financial business is already Meituan’s third largest business. From 2016 to 2019, the financial business contributed 290 million, 1.2 billion, 8.8 billion, and 16.1 billion revenues to Meituan, respectively, and the proportion of total revenue increased from 2.25% to 16.57%. The start time of the two is around 2015, and there is not much difference between the two in the initial stage.
At the same time, although Didi already has six financial licenses, core licenses such as consumer finance and banking are still absent. In this regard, the relevant person in charge of Didi said that Didi will deeply cultivate the financial ecology and accelerate the acquisition of more What a valuable financial license.
Although the status quo is unsatisfactory, from the perspective of Didi’s actions, it has no plans to regress.
In June of this year, Didi upgraded the structure of its financial business unit. Zhuo Zhuo, vice president of group finance and operation management, will also serve as general manager of the financial business unit and report to Zhu Jingshi, senior vice president. At the same time, the Financial Ecological Management Department was established to focus on the operation and management of licensed businesses and continue to deepen external cooperation.
Recently, Didi has tested the “Didi Monthly Payment” in grayscale again. This product is similar to Alipay’s Huabei and Jingdong’s Baitiao. Its rule is also “consumption this month, repayment next month.” The longest user A 38-day interest-free period is available. For users who are over 15 days overdue, Didi will suspend their use of taxi services, and will take measures such as freezing of accounts and restrictions on withdrawals/consumptions.
Interface News obtained a monthly report of Didi Finance’s payment business from an insider, Since the second half of this year, the daily orders of its payment business have reached one million, with nearly 30 million users.
Traffic and scenarios have always been the biggest footholds for Internet giants to enter the financial industry, and they are also their advantages. The reason why Didi refuses to retreat is also related to this.
At the beginning of November this year, Didi officially announced that its monthly domestic activity exceeded 400 million in October. Previously, in the three-year goal announced by Didi, MAU pointed to 800 million, which shows that Didi has a huge innateness on the user side. Advantages; in terms of scenarios, Didi’s financial vanguard is the auto insurance business closely related to automobiles.What is shown in the introduction of financial services is the content of “Didi Auto Insurance”.
At the same time, in terms of business, Didi has made a layout around the six licenses of insurance agency license, small loan license, third-party payment license, financial leasing, financing guarantee and insurance license. At present, Didi’s financial products are divided into three categories in the independent Didi Finance App, namely financial management, money lending, and insurance, including single products such as Dishuidai and Kumquat.
Among them, insurance is the first field that Didi entered. It can be traced back to July 2015. At that time, Didi and Ping An cooperated to launch the “Didi Passenger Accident Comprehensive Insurance”, and then launched the “Didi” for drivers. Di Auto Insurance”. At the same time, Didi also cooperated with PICC, ZhongAn Insurance and other insurance companies cooperate to divert the latter .
Even so, the progress of Didi’s financial business is still unsatisfactory. The reason is probably related to the nature of Didi. Compared with Meituan’s high consumption frequency and richer consumption scenes of eating, drinking and having fun, Didi is certainly close to the “car”, but the overall consumption scene is still too single, and there are also competitors in the “car”. In other sub-sectors, such as microfinance, we have to face giants like Alipay. It can be said that the status quo of Didi’s financial business is caused by internal and external “pressure”.
02 Two generations of giants board the same ship again
January 26, 2014, Tenpay imitated the Chinese custom of issuing red envelopes during the Spring Festival. The “New Year Red Packet” is launched on the account, and users can send or receive red packets to their friends after following the account.
This feature has achieved a viral effect after its launch, greatly shortening the gap between WeChat Pay and the pioneer Alipay. Since then, most of the domestic mobile payment industry’s market share has been occupied by Tencent and Ali, and the two are therefore regarded as representatives of Internet companies in finance.
To this day, although the two still have a huge lead in mobile payment, there are still other Internet companies in the entire financial industry including payment.
Take payment as an example. In this year alone, many Internet giants have deployed this business.
In June, 360 Finance launched a credit score product, which was benchmarked against Ant’s Sesame Credit points; 7 In November, Meituan’s monthly payment product was officially launched; Bytedance also entered the credit payment field in November and launched the “Reassuring Flower”.
Although there are more and more competitors, from the current market situation, Tencent and Ali are still two big mountains in the industry, and their positions are unshakable.
In fact, the companies that followed up did not underestimate the strengths of Tencent and Alibaba, nor did they overestimate their own capabilities, but including Didi in the travel industry, everyone has reasons to do it.
First of all, both the traditional financial industry and Internet finance have the characteristics of high profits. This is a huge temptation for any company, especially in the Internet industry where losses are normal.
Take Didi as an example, only Cheng Wei admitted to the public loss