Wu Minzhi takes the helm of the new Alipay: Ant Group's horse racing experiment has come to an end.

In September 2026, according to official announcements, Ant Group launched a new round of organizational restructuring: the former Alipay Business Group, Digital Payment Business Group and Sesame Credit were integrated into one to form a new Alipay Business Group. Wu Minzhi (alias Minzhi), the Group's CPO, took the top position, with functional lines including SG and BD all incorporated into her reporting line. Accordingly, Ant's first-level business groups were reduced from 5 to 4: the new Alipay, Credit, Wealth & Insurance, and Health.

A notable detail worth recording is that the two functional lines SG and BD were also brought into the new structure. The access of functional lines to the business group means the new Alipay has obtained a complete configuration similar to that of an independent company, and also means the top leader will take full overall responsibility for all results.

This is an unusual appointment. Wu Minzhi took over as Ant's Chief People Officer in January 2023, and her most well-known initiative over the past three years was leading the reform to abolish the traditional "P-level" job rank system. Shortly before the official announcement, she also delivered a speech at the Bund Summit in her capacity as CPO, with the theme of how to redesign organizations around value. Before the echoes of her speech faded, she herself stepped into this newly redesigned organization.

The person who has managed "human resources" for three years now takes charge of Ant's largest business. Alipay is the fundamental base of Ant, and also the intersection of all the anxieties of this company: market share, profit, public reputation, and corporate identity. Over the past three years, its organizational form has experienced merger, split into two parts, coexistence of five business groups, and finally returned to the integration of three business lines. The helm has changed three times within three years, from the founding veteran to two rotating presidents, and now to this CPO.

Our core judgment is that this merger is ostensibly an organizational adjustment, but in essence, Ant has ended its 21-month rotating horse-racing experiment, bringing the three lines of payment, users and credit under the responsibility of a single person. Most interpretations will read this as a move to gather strength for a counterattack, while a more accurate interpretation is that it is a power centralization move after admitting that the decentralized governance has failed.

The fact that the CPO takes up the front-line post shows that the group judges that the most urgent proposition for Alipay at present lies in organization and public morale. The problem is that personnel adjustment can only solve organizational problems. The business challenges are just beginning.

Disassembly: An Experiment Ended by the Company Itself

First, let's look at the respective origins of the three merged sections. The former Alipay Business Group managed the App and user operations. In March 2023, Alipay completed its largest senior management rotation in nearly seven years, and for the first time established the App Division and the Digital Product Division (reported by LatePost at that time), which marked the starting point of Alipay's "internet-oriented transformation".

The Digital Payment Business Group is the youngest, established only on December 23, 2024, integrating online payment, offline payment, Alipay China, corporate QR code, and Xiaohe operations. From its official launch to being merged, it only existed for about 21 months. In September 2025, the People's Bank of China approved the name change of Ant's two major operating entities, so that the payment business and the App business were respectively positioned at the corporate governance level. This set of decentralized governance designs was overturned just one year after its full implementation, which more or less indicates that the results failed to meet the group's expectations.

Sesame Credit is an old brand that launched its business in 2015. It withdrew from financial personal credit reporting services in 2018 and turned to commercial credit scenarios. Since July 2024, it has actually been taken over by Chen Xianda (alias Sun Wu), a cadre from the Alipay system, who led the release of the sub-brand "Sesame 800". Before the official announcement of the merger, Sesame Credit's commercial credit services were expanding to local life scenarios, and its business direction had long been aligned with Alipay.

The three business lines share one common point before the merger: none of them had a strong top leader in position. Alipay and Digital Payment were maintained by rotating presidents, while Sesame Credit had long been taken over. This means the organizational cost of the merger was deliberately minimized. From the architectural perspective, this merger mainly integrates the architecture itself.

Let's go back to December 23, 2024. Han Xinyi (born in 1977, bachelor and master of economics from Tsinghua University, took over as CEO in March 2025), the then president, announced that the former Alipay Business Group would be split into two, and pioneered the rotating president system with a term of 6 months. The internal email made it clear that the rotating president system was intended to "cultivate the next generation of leaders", and previewed that the company would explore innovative organizational methods for businesses such as Sesame Credit.

The foreshadowing was laid at that time. 21 months later, the experiment was taken back by the same company itself.

The rotating president system is extremely rare in fintech companies. Cooperated with the committee system, all division general managers reported directly to Han Xinyi, and there was actually no one to make final decisions at the business group level. Its essence is a horse-racing mechanism: dividing a separate business territory for each of the two candidates to see who can achieve better results. 21 months later, the horse-racing mechanism did not produce a universally recognized top leader, which is the implication behind the official wording for the end of the rotating system.

Personnel Accounts: Some Landed Softly, Some Left the Core Completely

Ni Xingjun, alias Miao Renfeng, is a member of Alipay's founding team. It is widely circulated in the industry that he is "the person who wrote the first line of code for Alipay". He grew from a programmer to product architect, Alipay's executive deputy team leader, and business group president. He also served as Ant's CTO since August 2020, and is one of the longest-serving business heads in Alipay's history.

In the organizational upgrade on March 19, 2024, Ni Xingjun stepped down as president of the Alipay Business Group, and was transferred to Chairman of OceanBase, Chairman of Ant Digital Technology, and concurrently served as Chairman of the Group's Technology Strategy Committee and Chairman of the Supervisory Board. He is still on the management team list to this day. In April of the same year, he stepped down as the legal representative and chairman of Alipay (China), and Han Xinyi took over the positions.

This is a standard soft landing for a founding veteran. During Ni Xingjun's tenure, Alipay completed its expansion from a payment tool to a platform, and also accumulated all the subsequent organizational complexity. Handing over the App and payment business and returning to the technology track is a decent arrangement for a veteran with a technical background. He left behind Alipay's most difficult battles, as well as the most intractable problems.

Shao Wenlan, alias Wen Lan, joined Alibaba in 2002 and transferred to Ant Group in 2015. She successively served as General Manager of Huabei Business Group, General Manager of Consumer Finance Business Group, Chairman of Sesame Credit from June 2019 to July 2024, and also took over the Insurance Business Group in early 2021. She is a new partner of Alibaba in 2021 and Vice President of Ant Group.

Her departure was gradual and also the most thorough: she stepped down as Chairman of Ant Insurance in November 2022, stepped down as Director of Ant Consumer Finance in July 2023, stepped down as Chairman of Ant Credit Evaluation in June 2024, and stepped down as Chairman of Sesame Credit in July of the same year. There has been no public and reliable report about her subsequent whereabouts. Judging from the rhythm of her stepping down, this is a well-arranged, uneventful exit.

Among the three merged business lines in this round, Shao Wenlan is the only former top leader who has substantially left the power system. The integration of Sesame Credit into Alipay officially marks the end of the era led by her.

To be fair, during Shao Wenlan's tenure, she established Sesame Credit's commercial credit route of "no labeling, no hierarchical classification". This route ensured the survival of Sesame Credit under the regulatory framework of disintermediation and credit reporting licensing, at the cost that Sesame Credit retreated from a financial infrastructure to a scenario service provider. This retreat was based on her own judgment, and also complied with the mandatory requirements of the regulatory environment at that time.

Then look at the two rotating presidents. Qin Yi is an alias whose real name has not been disclosed to the public, and he is the first rotating president of the Digital Payment Business Group. Pu Tian (real name Li Jun), former general manager of Alipay App Division, took the top position of the App Division in the March 2023 rotation. The rotating president is defined as "the first person in charge of the overall Ant strategy to be implemented in the business group", with a very heavy title but only a 6-month term.

The committee list of the Digital Payment Business Group also includes Shan Gong, Hong You, Fu Gui, Mo Yan. The real names corresponding to these aliases have never been disclosed to the public, and the outside world cannot match their identities. The six-month term makes the final decision-making power always suspended, which itself is an embarrassing footnote of the rotating president system.

Li Jun deserves a separate mention. At the time when the controversy over Alipay's content-based transformation was at its peak in 2023, he publicly responded and acknowledged the business difficulties. There are not many top leaders who dare to admit difficulties internally, and that statement may have helped Alipay restore some internal trust at that time. After 21 months of rotating presidency, he did not get the permanent promotion, but waited for a CPO to be parachuted into the top position.

The cruelty of the horse-racing mechanism lies in: The original intention of the design is to cultivate talents, but the actual result is often to consume them. The two business lines operated in parallel for nearly two years, each building its own team and setting its own pace, so the organizational friction during the merger will not be reduced by a single point. The group invited a founding-level veteran to take charge, which to some extent is paying for the opportunity cost of the past 21 months.

Business Accounts: Four Questions Without Answers

Why did Ant make this drastic move? The answer lies in the business performance. We will explain the problems in four levels.

The first level: market share. According to the transaction volume count caliber of Analysys, WeChat Payment had a 59.7% market share in the first quarter of 2025, while Alipay had 36.2%, while Alipay still had a 48.6% share at the end of 2023. In terms of offline payment transaction volume, the ratio of WeChat to Alipay is about 8 to 2. The penetration survey covering 300 cities at the end of 2024 and global monthly active user data also point to the same conclusion. It should be noted that there are opposite conclusions in terms of transaction value caliber, and some institutions estimate that Alipay leads with 54.5% share. But transaction volume represents high-frequency user mentality, and this battle was lost in daily usage scenarios.

Competitors are still increasing. Douyin spent 1.4 billion yuan to acquire a payment license in 2024. By the end of 2025, "Douyin Pay" has piloted offline acquiring services in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou, and its 800 million daily active users directly cut into the offline payment scenario. After Taobao accessed WeChat Payment, the remaining scenario exclusivity of Alipay was also removed. The once exclusive self-owned scenarios now have optional payment entrants.

The second level: profit. According to the equity method deduction from Alibaba's financial report (Alipay holds about 33% of the shares, and confirms the profit with a one-quarter delay), Ant Group's net profit peaked at 73 billion yuan in 2021, was 31.2 billion yuan in 2022, 23.8 billion yuan in 2023, rebounded to 38.3 billion yuan in 2024, and fell again to about 15.3 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year decline of about 60%. Among them, the net profit in the first quarter of 2025 was about 4.74 billion yuan (Reuters estimation caliber), and only about 1.136 billion yuan in the fourth quarter. The year-end profit level is more glaring than the annual figure.

Alibaba's explanation is that it has increased investment in new growth initiatives and technologies, and the fair value of several investments has declined. The disassembly from Caixin is more straightforward: before the rectification, Huabei and Jiebei supported about 40% of the revenue. After the rectification, the credit scale shrank significantly, and fund sales were impacted by fee reduction. The rebound in 2024 relied heavily on low base and book income, and the sharp decline in 2025 is closer to the real profit level of the main business.

The third level: subsidy dependence. "Peng Yi" is the only remarkable growth story of Alipay in recent years: LatePost disclosed that it is equipped with a team of thousands of people, deployed more than one million terminals in half a year, and reached 100 million users in 321 days, while scanning QR codes took 30 months to break 100 million users. In January 2026, it was officially announced that the average daily usage exceeded 100 million times.

The cost is also clear. 36Kr reported that in the first four months of 2025, the promotion subsidy and terminal installation investment exceeded 100 billion yuan, and the first batch of planned investment circulated internally was 300 billion yuan, with the maximum merchant subsidy of 6000 yuan per month. This is a ticket to the game table bought with real money. There is only one question: after the subsidy is withdrawn, will the users still stay?

The fourth level: public reputation of content and AI. Since 2023, Alipay has fully invested in short videos and live broadcasts. Its cooperation with NBA caused internal complaints, and its claim that the GMV of e-commerce live broadcasts increased by 25 times was questioned by employees for not mentioning the absolute value as a misleading act. It provided 1 billion yuan in cash and tens of billions of traffic to subsidize creators, and some MCN institutions directly stated that their main purpose was to get subsidies (reported by Shixiang).

The book performance and public reputation of AI business are also split: in the early stage of the launch of Xiaobao, the cumulative downloads in the Xiaomi App Store were only 680,000; AQ exceeded 10 million monthly active users in four months, with more than 140 million cumulative users, nearly 60% of whom came from cities below the third tier. It was renamed Ant Afu in December 2025, but its rating in the OPPO App Store was only 2.5 points. Ant's R&D investment in 2024 was 23.45 billion yuan, and the intensity of investment is not commensurate with the C-end user reputation.

There are two more hidden meanings outside the accounts. The financial holding license has not been implemented since the rectification requirement of "overall application for financial holding license" was put forward in 2021. The People's Bank of China has only approved 3 financial holding companies, all of which are state-owned. Caixin quoted regulatory sources as saying that the senior management still has not approved Ant's financial holding application. In terms of IPO, Ant officially refuted the rumor in December 2024 that "there is no listing plan at present", and then distributed dividends year after year. The two dividends in 2022 alone exceeded 43.8 billion yuan, the third dividend was in September 2024, and it was reviewed and approved again at the 2025 general meeting of shareholders. Dividends and share repurchases in the case of no hope of listing are to appease shareholders and employees, and also to admit that time is not on their side for the moment.