Former Google Engineer Helps Make China Become A ‘Cashless Society’

Ant Financial, a spinoff from Alipay of  China search engine giant Alibaba, offers credit card payment and financial services at scale in a country whose population is 1.4 billion, as well as to consumers worldwide.  Zhengyu He, head of systems engineering at Ant Financial, described what it has taken to bring monolithic and outdated systems to meet today’s computing challenges at scale during a podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Shanghai. Before Ant Financial was founded in 2014, Alipay had already begun to offer credit card payment services to consumers. “At that moment, China was not a really developed country and  we didn’t really have..sophisticated credit card systems,” He said, who worked at Google as a software engineer for over six years. “Ant Financial took the responsibility of actually building the national scale payment systems...And this is actually one of the greatest inventions I would say, in the last couple of years in China — so it’s like what we now call a cashless society." Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rmL_oxsMZuM