26 – 100 in alphabetical order by company: Kenny Man, head of international investments and post-investment, Ant Group
Kenny Man is head of international investment and post-investment at Ant Group, China-based e-commerce group Alibaba’s financial services affiliate.
Formerly known as Ant Financial, the group was formally established in 2014 to create the infrastructure and platform to support the digital transformation of the service industry and to enable all consumers and small businesses to have equal access to financial and other green and sustainable services , such as online payment platform Alipay. Its business include wealth management services Yu’e Bao, digital bank Mybank and Zhima Credit, the credit scoring system also known as Sesame Credit.
Ant Group’s $35bn dual offering on Shanghai’s Star Exchange and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange – which was set to be one of the largest initial public offerings (IPOs) in history and could have potentially valued it at more than $250bn – was blocked in November 2020 and is working closely with regulators thereafter.
Since re-joining Ant in April 2015, Man has been involved in all the overseas acquisitions and investments, including 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. He has been leading a dozen more fintech related investment globally including Gcash in Philippines, True Money in Thailand, Kakaopay in Korea, Bkash in Bangladesh, Stone and Dotz in Brazil, just to name a few. He is also board member in many of these portfolio companies including TNGd in Malaysia, Alipay HK, Gcash, True Money, Bkash, among others.
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.
Man has been with Alibaba since 2006 and was “deeply involved” in the first B2B Alibaba IPO.
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 University of British Columbia.
