Yu'ebao boosts capital supply for economy: report

BEIJING - Yu'ebao, a popular online wealth management product, will help boost funds available for China's real economy, instead of raising financing costs, an official report showed on Monday.

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The product has served as a way of collecting small amounts of money from customers, according to a report filed to Xinhua by the Ali Small and Micro Financial Service Group, a branch of e-commerce firm Alibaba in charge of the service.

Yu'ebao, which literally means "account balance treasure", was put online by online payment platform Alipay in June to help customers "manage excess funds in their Alipay accounts."

It has more than 81 million users with capital raised reaching 500 billion yuan ($81.55 billion) by the end of February.

The report was the first official response to an accusation of a commentator who said that Yu'ebao is like a "vampire" as it will raise the capital cost of commercial banks and subsequently increase the financing costs for enterprises.

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