Chinese insurance company ZhongAn Online Property and Casualty Insurance, which boasts a customer base of 500 million people, has obtained approval to open an initial public offering (IPO) on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

China’s first online-only insurance company hopes that the IPO will raise as much as $1.5 billion USD. This would make it the largest IPO on the Hong Kong stock exchange by a financial technology company, which has had $5.73 billion USD in new listings since January.

The IPO is set to open on Honk Kong’s stock exchange on September 18th.

By securing approval to establish an IPO in Hong Kong, ZhongAn falls in line with a long list of Chinese companies seeking to open IPOs abroad in light of the country’s recent ban on initial coin offerings (ICOs). This list also includes fintech giants such as Ant Financial, a subsidiary of Alibaba, and Lijiazui International Financial Asset Exchange, or Lufax.

Also notable is the fact that ZhongAn was founded in 2013 by Alibaba’s Chief Executive Officer, Jack Ma, Tencent Chairman Pony Ma, and Ping An’s Insurance Group Chairman Ma Mingzhe. As a result, Alibaba holds a 16% share, Tencent holds a 12.1% share, and Ping An holds 12.1% share in Zhong An.

In addition to these big-ticket companies, smaller mainland-based lending platforms, such as Ppdai.com, Neo Capital, and Diarong are seeking share-listings in foreign markets. Diarong, for example, has already raised $220 million USD from investors.

South China Morning Post (which is owned by Alibaba) reports that, among China’s countless fintech startups, those which have the greatest incentive to seek funds oversees are P2P lending platforms.

This relates to the fact that, last year, China adopted a litany of new regulations governing P2P lenders.

These regulations set strict limitations on what Chinese P2P lenders need to maintain legality, and on what they can do, even if considered legal. For example, they must appoint custodian banks to oversee lend deposits and fully disclose their operations to regulators. Even then, according to the Financial Times, they cannot guarantee principal or interest on the loans they facilitate, nor can they issue loans of greater value than RMB1 million (about $155,000 USD).

For a while, it may have been possible for Chinese companies to avoid this regulation issue by opting for the use of initial coin offerings as opposed to IPOs. The former were far less regulated, and were far more accessible to smaller, start-ups firms.

This avenue was abruptly destroyed earlier this week, when China banned ICOs altogether.

Amid China’s clamp down on domestic IPOs and ICOs, domestic fintech companies have been given little choice but to look abroad for expansion. By operating in markets with looser regulatory policies, mainland Chinese companies may hope to clear the hurdles they face at home.

Read more at: Financial Times, Forbes, Reuters, South China Morning Post