Yu'E Bao deposits hit $86.99 billion by March

Yu'E Bao, an investment service offered by Alipay, China's leading online payments provider, and Tianhong Asset Management, had attracted aggregate deposits of about 541.3 billion yuan ($86.99 billion) by the end of March.

Yu'E Bao fund manager Tianhong said in a news release on April 18 that it has managed to bring combined profits of about 7.5 billion yuan to Yu'E Bao’s investors since the service was launched in June 2013.

The so-called grassroots wealth management product's profit in the first quarter alone was 5.7 billion yuan, Tianhong said.

The service, designed to make it easy for Alipay users to invest their idle cash in their Alipay accounts and get a higher interest rate than typical bank savings deposits, is the first of its kind in China and has been popular from the start.

However, due to the decreasing yields of the money market fund, returns on Yu'E Bao have been shrinking since the beginning of this year. Tianhong said that the growth of Yu’E Bao deposits has been stable since March following a phase of a surging increase.

The Beijing-based company said that as much as 1359.2 billion yuan worth of Yu'E Bao product had been subscribed by investors by the end of March, out of which 818.1 yuan billion had been redeemed.