Chinese Tech Giant Sina Focuses On Social Commerce. Plans To Roll Out An Online Banking Platform

The Chinese tech giant behind the Twitter style microblogging platform Sina Weibo, Sina has shown its interest towards social commerce. According to a story published at TNW, the tech giant wishes to roll out an online banking platform in September.

The story that was broken by Beijing News, states that the new service will allow consumers all kinds of financial transactions. The new service titled WeiBank will allow features like complete bank transfers, make remittances, manage credit cards, etc.

Though the company – which was in news for Alibaba’s recent purchase of an 18 percent stake – has not revealed any more specific details on how will the integration happen with Sina’s other products. With the China’s leading online e-commerce company, Alibaba partially owning the micro blogging platform, it wouldn’t be long before the company applies the social layer. In fact activities like shopping are inherently social and the gradual transition of eCommerce is social commerce.

Earlier in the month of June, the Chinese free messaging app WeChat from Tencent Holdings Ltd had integrated WeChat with CMB to provide financial features to the customers. The talked about partnership will enable interesting features to credit card holders and all the information binds to their respective WeChat account. This feature now allows customers to check their bills, credits, limits or transaction records.

Besides this the messaging app that has more than 300M users globally and out of which 70M are located outside of China is planning to introduce two more features. The features that are in trial are voice-text-service and providing real time details based on the location details of the customers.

During the same period, the messaging app enabled online transactions for selected merchants by linking a payment service. Corporate names like McDonalds are one of the first companies to open an online channel via WeChat.

The move from Sina indicates that the tech company is looking for new channels of monetization but will have to wait for more specific details on the business model related to WeiBank.

Image courtesy: Forbes.