LUFAX, China’s biggest peer-to-peer lending and wealth management platform, sees a potential listing helping to fund expansion at home and abroad, though it has set no specific timeline for a deal, chief executive officer Gregory Gibb said yesterday.

    Valued at US$18.5 billion when it raised US$1.2 billion from a group of investors in January, Lufax picked four banks to prepare a Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) that could raise US$5 billion, sources said previously. Giant Chinese insurer Ping An Insurance is its biggest investor.

    “We really don’t comment on specific plans around the IPO,” Gibb said, speaking on the sidelines of a financial technology conference in Hong Kong.

    “Whether it’s for supporting domestic growth or supporting, eventually, international moves...if you have that flexibility, it’s a good thing to have,” Gibb said, referring to a stock market listing.

    Lufax is looking to expand into Hong Kong or Singapore in a bid to offer more wealth management products and other international investments to wealthy Chinese investors in its platform, Gibb said.

    “The main core [of the business] will remain domestic for the foreseeable future,” Gibb said. “We’ll be working in a financial center, like Hong Kong or Singapore, to start providing global products to those investors, keeping our idea of an open platform.”

    New regulations unveiled by China in August to tame its peer-to-peer market will slow down growth for the market as a whole, forcing many smaller players to shut down, Gibb said. But larger firms like Lufax should benefit as investors look for relative safety in more established firms.

    While the market as whole is expected to grow between 30-40 percent in 2016, Lufax expects to expand “north of 50 percent,” Gibb said.

    The top five players that already control about 60 percent of the China’s peer-to-peer lending market are likely to increase their share to 70 percent by the end of 2017. (SD-Agencies)