Chinese OTA LY.com is entering the financial sector by launching a checking financial product, Tong Tong Bao, on December 18. The service is available for reservation from now.
LY.com set up LY Financial Services based in Shanghai Lujiazui District this year with RMB100 million in registered capital. LY Financial offers financial-related information and data service solutions to China’s tourism industry. LY Financial Services aspires to become a benchmark-setting leader in China’s tourism finance segment and create added value for users and partners.
“We want to emphasize from the outset that we don’t offer pure financial products. All our financial products are tourism-related,” a LY Financial spokesperson said.
Although LY.com is a latecomer to tourism finance, its advantage lies in its operations model. LY Financial sets out to integrate tourism and finance, to ensure all products fully integrate the two business areas, and offer users value and attract users.
From a product perspective, LY.com’s newly launched Tong Tong Bao further explores the tourism funding concept while integrating tourism funding and cash profits to offer products of higher earnings to users. Tong Tong Bao also leverages social aspects to make finance more user-friendly. Its installment payment product inserts user data from LY.com’s existing operations to offer a more convenient experience in the application process.
Launching Tong Tong Bao is only the first step of LY.com’s foray into the finance sector. In the future, LY Financial will continue to explore new integrated tourism finance models in the wealth management and consumer finance segments.
Besides checking products like Tong Tong Bao it will also launch installment payment and funding products. It will also launch a crowdfunding project very soon to kick-start unique products rare in the market. It will also offer more corporate financial services for corporate clients on its tourism production line.
LY.com plans to invest RMB1.5 billion (approx: US$233 million) in the future to improve its upstream and downstream production chain and create a LY Financial ecosystem that will include five major service branches -– supplier chain finance, micro-finance, consumer finance, wealth finance and cross-border finance.(Translation by David)
