The Internet's demand for finance stems from the e-commerce demand for transactions. In early 2003, Taobao launched the "secured transaction" model to solve the problem of e-commerce credit and reduce the transaction risk Taiwan Phone Number List of online shopping. The "secured transaction" was named Alipay and operated independently from Taobao in 2004. Tencent's Taiwan Phone Number List payment company Tenpay was established in 2005. In 2009, the size of China's Internet payment market exceeded 500 billion yuan, various companies emerged, and chaos such as misappropriation of funds, illegal cash out, and money laundering also began to emerge.

In order to regulate the industry order, the central bank established a third-party payment license in 2010. Since then, non-bank payment Taiwan Phone Number List business including online payment has been included in the regulatory system. Since May 2011, the central bank has approved a total of 271 companies to obtain payment licenses; after Taiwan Phone Number List March 2015, payment licenses have been stopped. In the Internet scenario, the purpose of payment is to improve the business closed-loop. In addition to data security considerations, data mining and user life cycle management are also inseparable from payment. Internet payment is the starting point of Internet finance and the moat of Internet finance.

After the central bank stopped issuing licenses, the only way to obtain licenses paid by third parties was acquisition, and the price of paying licenses also rose. In 2016, the price of Meituan’s acquisition of a payment license with a bank Taiwan Phone Number List card acquiring business reached 1.35 billion yuan; in 2017, Didi’s acquisition of an Internet payment business license was priced at 300 million yuan, while the highest price of the license was 3 billion yuan in 2016. Meta-merger Taiwan Phone Number List synergy advantage. Payment licenses have become the "standard" for large Internet companies, and industry upstarts such as ByteDance, Pinduoduo, and Kuaishou are also actively seeking a payment license through direct or indirect methods.