Ant Financial Services Group, a finance affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, plans to adopt a partnership structure to allow top management to retain control of its board after an IPO, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
Unnamed sources familiar with the matter were quoted by the report as saying that partners of Ant Financial will nominate a majority of directors in a structure similar to that used by its parent company Alibaba when it went public on the New York Stock Exchange the previous year.
The finance business was valued at more than $40 billion in a recent round of fundraising, the source added.
Alibaba and Ant Financial both declined to comment about the report in an e-mailed statement.
Ant Financial, which is valued by Bloomberg at $56.5 billion, owns Alipay, China's biggest online payment system.
According to data released by Beijing-based market research consulting firm iResearch earlier in March, Alipay dominated China's online payment market by transactions with a 49.6-percent share.
The data also revealed that the transaction volumes of China's online payments reached more than 8 trillion yuan ($1.28 trillion) in 2014, a 50.3-percent increase year on year.
Online payments and Internet finance in general have become a promising market in recent years, although analysts point out the lack of safety due to insufficient regulations in the industry.
Pan Gongsheng, deputy governor of People's Bank of China, said during an annual session with Chinese policymakers earlier this March that regulations and rules for online finance are expected to come out in the first half of this year.