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Nov. 30 (NBD) -- Ant Financial Service Group has appointed Simon Hu, former president of Alibaba Cloud, as its president.

Eric Jing, chairman and CEO at Ant Financial said in an email to staff that Hu's return to the company is a major organizational upgrade, which is expected to bring new breakthroughs to Ant Financial's inclusive financial business and credit system building.

Simon Hu joined Alibaba Group in 2005 and was involved in the early development of the e-commerce giant's loan unit, which was later spun off into online lender MYbank.

The business volume of the unit under Hu's leadership has surged by more than 300 percent annually for several years.

In 2013, the department merged with Alipay, the popular mobile-payment platform of Alibaba, and Hu worked as chief risk officer from November 2013 to October 2014.

Ant Financial then was founded in October 2014, operating business segments including Alipay, Yu'E Bao, MYbank, Credit Pay and Zhima Credit.

The financial service giant finished the 1.85-billion-U.S. dollars series A round of funding in July 2015 and it further raised more than 4.5 billion U.S. dollars the next year.

Ant Financial is valued at over 150 billion U.S. dollars after a latest round of financing worth 14 billion U.S. dollars, marking the world's largest single private fundraising.

Currently, the number of Alipay users around the world has exceeded 900 million. Among Chinese active users, 70 percent of them use three or more Alipay services. 

Before going back to Ant Financial, Hu had served at Ali Cloud, Alibaba's cloud computing subsidiary, for nearly four years. 

The company has posted an annual growth of over 100 percent on average since 2015 and established its presence in the global cloud computing market.

A report on the global public cloud service industry in 2018 by research institution Gartner shows that Amazon Web Services grabs 51.8 percent of market share while Microsoft's Azure and Ali Cloud hold 13.3 percent and 4.6 percent, respectively.

Ali Could now sells cloud computing services and owns more than 600 products and features related to big data analytics, artificial intelligence and security applications.

The return of Simon Hu follows Eric Jing taking office as chairman of Ant Financial in April this year.

Ant Financial insider believes that the latest move reflects the company's technology strategy. Hu is hoped to also make achievements in the new position and help Ant Finacial enhance its technology strength and develop more products.

Email: zhanglingxiao@nbd.com.cn