China's powerful fintech companies are ready to make a greater push for expansion abroad, starting with the Asian market.

Having taken a stranglehold in the world's second-largest economy, the firms are setting their sights firmly on globalization.

In China, mobile payments and transfers are the most frequently-used service fintech service, which has boomed in the country in recent years.

The move into Asia is in keeping with the global trend toward the continent which has seen record funding rounds by investors. In the second quarter of this year, Asia beat the US with seven fintech mega-rounds of funding, which means more than 100 million US dollars for each round, according to the data from research firm CB Insights. 

Insurers start globalization from Asia

One of the more recent significant moves involves Japan's SoftBank which is backing ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance, China's first online insurer, as the company takes its technology into international markets.

SoftBank's Vision Fund invested about 100 million US dollars in a joint venture with ZhongAn International, the global arm of the five-year-old Hong Kong-listed insurer. 

Instead of applying for an insurance license overseas, which will be time-consuming and expensive, or acquiring a local company, ZhongAn plans to "export our technology platform as a product," Wayne Xu, COO of ZhongAn Insurance, told CGTN.

He was elaborating on the digital insurer's globalization strategy during its first tech open day on Wednesday in Shanghai. 

ZhongAn will offer digital solutions for insurance companies' digitalization and to help Internet companies get better online insurance services, Xu said.

ZhongAn will start its globalization drive from Asian countries, including Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand, according to Xu.

Targeting Asian countries and exporting solutions have been common approaches for Chinese fintech firms in going global. 

Another example is Ant Financial Services Group. The operator of China's biggest online payment platform started its globalization in 2015 by cooperating with India's Paytm, which had the world's third largest digital wallet by the end of 2017.

After the first try in India, Ant Financial expanded its business to Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia through joint ventures established with local partners. 

China's leading position in fintech 

Compared with other counterparts in Asia, Chinese companies have a leading position in digitalization, Xu said, attributing the advantage to China's huge domestic market, driving force for innovation and enough IT talents. 

"Innovation will be almost impossible if the market is not large enough," he said. 

Chinese companies accounted for five of the top 10 fintech companies globally in 2017, ranked on innovation, capital raising activity, size and reach by KPMG and fintech investment firm H2 Ventures.

China has leapfrogged other nations in the mobile era, bypassing the offline transaction system and allowing innovators to disrupt old models.

Ant Financial's payment tool Alipay processed 1.48 billion transactions in 24 hours during the 2017 online shopping festival.

ZhongAn Insurance, although still suffering losses, posted a 106.6 percent year-on-year growth of premium income for the first half of 2018, according to the company's mid-year report released on August 27.

(Video by CGTN's Liang Si)