A big Chinese group and a US not-for-profit have triumphed in the second annual Financial Times fintech awards, with Ant Financial taking the “impact” prize and QCash winning for “innovation”.

Ant Financial is the 800-pound gorilla of the fintech world. With a dominant share of more than half of China’s fast-growing $5.5tn mobile payments market, this spin-off from the Alibaba ecommerce group has raised more funding than any rival and is valued at over $70bn — more than most banks.

Launched in 2004 as a PayPal-type service to facilitate payment on Alibaba’s ecommerce platforms, Ant Financial had 450m annual active users at the end of April 2016 — 10 times more than even the biggest lenders — and it has continued to double its user base in the past year.