BABA Alibaba Group Holding Limited

  By Stella Yifan Xie 
 

A robo-advisory joint venture between Vanguard Group and Jack Ma's Ant Financial Services Group has started providing mutual-fund recommendations to users of the latter's popular Alipay mobile platform, kicking off the U.S. investing giant's first major foray in China.

On Thursday, some users of Alipay were given access to a new service called Help You Invest that carried the brand names of Ant and Vanguard. Individuals with at least 800 yuan ($113) will be guided to assemble tailored investment portfolios by selecting from a pool of around 6,000 mutual funds overseen by more than 100 domestic asset managers.

An Ant spokesman said the service will be offered to all of Alipay's 900 million users in China on April 2. Investors who use the service will be charged a small daily fee of about CNY0.14 for every CNY100 they invest. That amounts to an annualized fee of 0.5%, which the Ant spokesman said was "in line with industry practices."

Vanguard, America's second-largest asset manager after BlackRock Inc., launched its domestic Chinese business in May 2017 when it opened a Shanghai office. The index-fund pioneer previously said its goal was to bring low-cost investing to China's masses. It isn't allowed to sell its own products in the country yet.

Vanguard's joint venture with Ant was formed last year, with Vanguard owning 49% and Ant holding a 51% stake.

The investment-advisory venture is going live after a tumultuous period for global financial markets, which have been pressured by the widening coronavirus pandemic. China's Shanghai Composite Index is down 8.6% year to date, though it has performed better than many global peers.

Write to Singapore Editors at singaporeeditors@dowjones.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 27, 2020 02:58 ET (06:58 GMT)

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