GCV Powerlist 2017: Kai Nin Man

Kai Nin (Kenny) Man, head of international investment at Ant Financial, which runs the AliPay payments platform for former parent Alibaba’s e-commerce operation, has had a busy year.

In January last year, Man joined the board of One97 Communications, the India-based parent company of Paytm, the subcontinent’s main online payments platform, just before the country demonetarised and effectively removed cash from the banking system. Demand for electronic cash has taken off in India and Ant’s investments in One97 the year before seems to have been timed well.

Since joining Ant in April 2015, Man has been involved in all the overseas acquisitions and investments, including the KT Consortium for the KBank licence deal, Paytm and Ascend Money in Thailand, while South Korea-based Kakao took in $200m from Ant to spin out its payments platform.

Ant has been an active investor in its homeland, too, leading Youon Bike’s series A round, joining car-sharing platform Didi Chuxing’s $4.5bn round and a $100m C round for second-hand car market Souche.

Before his time at Ant, Man was a senior investment director at Vision Knight Capital, a private equity firm, where he had led the 91.com deal sold to Baidu for $1.9bn and the New york flotation of 500.com. Earlier, he was a director in Alibaba’s investment and acquisition team working on the Vendio, Auctiva and Singlefeed deals in the US and Oncard Payments in China.

Alibaba had spun out Ant before its own flotation in 2014 and Man was “deeply involved” in the Alibaba initial public offering, according to his biography.

Before Alibaba, Man was the bottling operations planning manager at Pepsi China and had worked at consultancy McKinsey & Co in the corporate finance and strategy practice. He has an executive MBA from Kellogg School of Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and a bachelor of commerce degree from Canada’s University of British Columbia.