Alipay has over 700 million annual active users as of August 2018, according to an investor day presentation from parent Ant Financial that was emailed to Bank Innovation. This represents a 40% increase in active users year-over-year.

Last August, Alipay had about 500 million annual active users. To put that growth in perspective, payments company PayPal expects to add 30 million active users in the U.S. by end of the year, whereas Alipay managed to add over 200 million active users within a year and expects to add many more in the coming months.

And indeed, it likely will, as Ant Financials’ Singles Day shopping event is less than two months away. Last year, Alibaba Group processed nearly 1.5 billion transactions during this event, most of which was on Alipay. Alibaba recorded sales (or gross merchandise volume, GMV) of $25.3 billion for that event. Of that, 90% of the GMV was via Alipay.

But for Ant Financial, a large part of its focus this year and next is on its small business customers.  According to a presentation from Eric Jing, Ant Financial’s executive chairman CEO, “Ant Financial is committed to offering a full suite of products, solutions, and technologies to support our partners to better serve consumers and small businesses more efficiently and effectively.”

This year, already Ant has been doing just that. Jing pointed to the company’s recently introduced AI-driven credit assessment tools, which has enabled Chinese traditional FIs to instantly extend lines of credit to approximately 11 million small businesses.

Another area of focus will be on cross-border remittance payments in Hong Kong and the Philippines, according to Jing’s presentation. Back in June, AlipayHK partnered with GCash and created a cross-border payments service based on Ant’s proprietary blockchain technology. The service allows users to send money at low exchange rates and in realtime.

Alibaba‘s Investor Day will continue today through tomorrow. The full webcast can be accessed here.