Alibaba spins off Alipay’s Loyalty Scheme as Jifenbao to boost appeal to other platforms

China’s e-commerce market is booming and in a bid to tap it, one of the leading third-party online payment platforms Alipay, has spun off its reward points service to form a wholly owned subsidiary, Jifen Bao.

The online payment platform will be based in Nanjing, Jiangsu province and an initial capital of 10 million yuan (1.57 million U.S. dollars) will be injected in to it.

Company officials said Tuesday that clients will now be able to redeem points and pay utility bills or make purchases on e-commerce subsidiaries affiliated to Alibaba such as Taobao through the service.

Alipay was first launched in 2002 and according to the vice CEO of the subsidiary, Jing Xiandong, opportunities for the company to be independent are mature. Jing said that the number of Jifen Bao’s partners was rising.

Such partners include other e-commerce sites, hotels, telecom firms in south and east coastal regions, industrial bank and Wanlitong.com, Ping An’s points-for-prizes platform. With nearly 600 million users, Alipay is the no. 1 third-party payment platform inChina. In the past few years, e-commerce has grown rapidly in China.

In the third quarter this year, the online retail market trading volume stood at 212 billion yuan, this being a 58% growth from the same period last year.