PUBLISHED: 05 NOVEMBER 2019 AUTHOR: FINTECH CIRCLE For highly regulated industries like fintech, cloud companies can be valuable local partners to support and guide foreign organisations through the regulatory and technical challenges of expanding into new territories. Microsoft and Amazon both have a presence in China with Azure and AWS, however domestic cloud services dominate China’s market. According to a recent report by Canalys, Alibaba Cloud is the largest player in China with 43% of the market while Tencent, AWS and Baidu have experienced faster growth in Q2 2019. Chinese cloud service providers also look to the UK as Alibaba Cloud with data centres in London recently partnered with their first UK distributor. A spokesperson for Alibaba Cloud explained: “With Alibaba Group’s company mission to make it easy to do business anywhere we provide a first-class partner ecosystem for companies in the UK or Europe to enter the China market, and vice versa. Alibaba Cloud provides cloud and data intelligence across all business units in the Alibaba Group ecosystem. Based on its established domain expertise and best practice, it can provide vertical specific cloud-based solutions in the UK.” “Cloud infrastructure has become a norm, companies need to turn data into actionable insight, leveraging data technology in the age of Digital Transformation. Alibaba Cloud aims to provide reliable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions, and intelligent Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) working with its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) partners to get businesses onboard more readily and help them better adapt to the digital age.” Having digital services physically located in data centres in China means that not only will the Great Firewall be less of a hurdle, but content and services will get to the end user quicker. Below is a list of the main players within this space.

Alibaba Cloud

If you need coverage in mainland, China Alibaba Cloud has one of the highest numbers of data centres located in the country. It can act as a gateway to China while also supporting UK fintech companies with ICP licence applications.

AWS China

While facing strong domestic competition and regulatory hurdles, Amazon Web Services have become available in Beijing and Ningxia. Not all the products on AWS global are offered in China though there are enough to serve small to enterprise level applications.

Azure China

Microsoft Azure, the first international cloud provider in China, offers a physically isolated instance of Azure services run by a China-based company 21Vianet, ensuring compliance with local regulations.

Baidu Cloud

The leading Chinese language internet search company Baidu also offers hosting with data centres in Beijing, Guangzhou, Suzhou and Hong Kong. Baidu Cloud recently released library of AI toolkits for computing, network, storage and database.

Tencent Cloud

Tencent Cloud is used by more than 10,000 developers worldwide with popular products in China such as QQ and WeChat Pay. Providing services for hundreds of millions of people, Tencent is now leveraging on its gaming tech to drive B2B cloud services for finance.

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