Alison Tudor-Ackroyd

China’s regulators have foiled the largest stock sale in global finance as they called a halt on the November 5 debut of Ant Group’s IPO on the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges, less than 48 hours before the highly anticipated start of trading. Some 1.55 million small investors in Hong Kong had pumped $167.7 billion into the initial public offering in a bid to get a slice of the shares. They will get refunds, which include brokerage commission and stock exchange trading fee, within this week, according to Ant’s stock exchange filing. A meeting earlier this week between Ant Group’s senior executives and China’s top financial regulators led to “significant change” to Ant’s business environment

Digital financial services giant Ant Group is on the cusp of pulling off the world’s biggest initial public offering and could be worth over $500 billion in the near future, riding on the digitization of financial services in the world’s second-largest economy. Ant’s coming out parade illustrates China’s lead in digital finance. Its super-slick mobile payment app, Alipay, has over 1 billion users, who can click on the Alipay app for services ranging from food deliveries to garbage collection. It is the world’s most popular app outside social-media networks. Ant plans to plough the $34.5 billion it is raising from dual listings in Hong Kong and Shanghai into future revenue drivers, such as bl