A woman walks past a closed branch of peer-to-peer lender Ezubao in Huaibei, Anhui Province, in 2016. The company turned out to be a Ponzi scheme that collected over $9 billion from investors.

China's wild online lending frontier tests regulators

As the industry swells, Beijing scrambles to weed out fraudsters and Ponzi artists

HENNY SENDER, Nikkei Asian Review columnist

February 28, 2018 14:00 JST

HONG KONG -- By some accounts, it was only when stock exchanges on both sides of the Pacific began sparring to win the mandate for the expected $100 billion flotation of Ant Financial, an arm of Alibaba Group Holding, that regulators in China realized just how big internet finance had become in the country.