OneConnect, the financial technology subsidiary of Chinese insurance giant Ping An, has updated its filing for an initial public offering (IPO) with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Reports circulating in November claimed that OneConnect initially sought approval for a $100 million IPO.
According to an F-1 filing dated Dec. 2, the firm is looking to sell $500 million worth of shares in its IPO. The recent filing states:
“We expect that we will receive net proceeds of approximately US$438.2 million from this offering, or approximately US$504.6 million if the underwriters exercise their over-allotment option in full.”
In the filing, the company explains that its platform provides “cloud-native technology solutions” and its “solutions provide technology applications and technology-enabled business services to financial institutions.”
Overall, OneConnect claims that its services allow customers to increase revenue, manage risks, improve efficiency, enhance service quality and reduce costs.
The firm also claims that at the end of September it had over 3,700 customers, including “all of China’s major banks, 99% of its city commercial banks, and 46% of its insurance companies, collectively reaching hundreds of millions of end-customers.” Technologies employed by the company include artificial intelligence, big data and blockchain.
The current target is much lower than the $1 billion OneConnect sought in a Hong Kong IPO filing earlier this year.
Bold claims about blockchain performance
The company claims that its blockchain technology can manage up to 50,000 transactions per second with a latency under 0.5 seconds, while also implementing privacy through zero-knowledge proofs. OneConnect’s technology has been used to develop the major blockchain-based trade finance platform eTradeConnect in partnership with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.
The documents also claim that OneConnect’s parent firm, Ping An Group, is China’s second-largest financial institution and the sixth-largest in the world by market capitalization. According to company data website Crunchbase, OneConnect has received $650 million in funding so far in a single round led by Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank.
As the blockchain and cryptocurrency industries are becoming more mature, IPO announcements have become ever more frequent. Last month, Bitcoin mining giant Canaan Creative also held an IPO, which raised $90 million – over 75% less than expected.
Fintech Firm Partners With R3 to Develop Shariah-Compliant Market Platform
Dubai-based fintech company Wethaq has entered into a strategic partnership with enterprise software firm R3, in order to create a platform for issuing and trading sukuk securities based on R3’s Corda offering.
A platform for Islamic securities
According to a press release on Aug. 28, Wethaq’s platform is built on R3’s open source enterprise blockchain platform Corda, and the company has been taking steps to ensure that it is likewise compliant with Sharia Law.
Wethaq’s platform is reportedly designed to improve the market infrastructure for issuing and trading sukuk securities. Sukuk is heavily regulated and demands a considerable amount of time for issuance. Wethaq hopes to automate and streamline this process, as well as the entire sukuk lifecycle, per the announcement.
Sukuk is a type of financial certificate similar to a bond that complies with Islamic Sharia Law. Sukuks differ from traditional bonds in that they denote partial ownership in an asset, whereas bonds are a debt obligation. Since sukuks share the risk of the backing asset, the holder is not guaranteed to receive back their initial investment.
R3 CEO David Rutter spoke about the partnership, saying that R3 believes Corda could modernize the economy in Saudia Arabia and the Middle East at large. Wethaq CEO Mohammed Alsehli also commented on the partnership, discussing the two firms’ overarching goals, saying:
“Our joint focus is on building world-class financial infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, in alignment with the Kingdom’s Vision 2030, and the UAE, pursuant to their ambitious fintech agenda, before we expand to the entire Middle East and Southeast Asia.”
Stellar: another Sharia-compliant platform
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Ripple-based platform Stellar said in July 2018 that it was the first distributed ledger protocol to obtain Sharia compliance certification, for the money transfer and asset tokenization field. Stellar was approved by the Shariyah Review Bureau – an international Sharia agency licensed by the Central Bank of Bahrain.
Cryptocurrency NOORCOIN was certified with a Sharia Certificate from the World Sharia Advisory Committee before Stellar back in March. At the time, NOORCOIN declared itself as “the first sharia-compliant utility token.”
