China-based online financial services provider Lufax received $1.33bn in a round co-led by financial services firm SBI Holdings. Other corporate participants in the deal were financial services firms JP Morgan, Macquarie Group, UBS, UOB as well as investment banking firm Goldman Sachs through its Private Equity Group division. The state-owned Qatar Investment Authority co-led with SBI the round, which reportedly valued Lufax at $38bn pre-money.
Established in 2011, Lufax initially launched as a peer-to-peer lending and brokerage subsidiary of insurance firm Ping An but has since grown into a wealth management firm. It had a loan balance of approximately $24.5bn by the end of May 2018, according to analytics firm Online Lending House.
Lufax is a business from the broader subsector of wealth management and personal finance within the fintech space, which has seen plenty of corporate backed deals in recent years, as shown on the historical bar chart by GCV Analytics below. The number of such deals in that subsector reached a peak last in 2017 at 52 transactions, worth an estimated total of $1.53bn of total capital invested, up from $66m invested over merely 10 rounds back in 2013. As for 2018, by the end of November, we had tracked a significantly lower number of corporate-backed deals than last year’s (24) but worth an estimated $1.37bn. This clearly indicates that valuations of promising businesses in that space must have risen.
