Yang Bing

Since joining Ant Group in 2009, Yang Bing has been focused on building better, faster databases for tracking digital payments—call him Larry Ellison 2.0. In June 2020, Yang became CEO of the newly founded OceanBase subsidiary, where he’s now busy pushing China to the forefront of digital payments tech. OceanBase’s core product is a database technology of the same name, originally developed to track transactions for Alipay. But OceanBase could become something much bigger: In 2019, it beat Oracle’s long-standing database speed record in a global challenge. OceanBase now tracks transactions for a long list of Chinese banks such as the Bank of Xi’an and the Bank of Nanjing. Current geopolitics may make it hard to crack the U.S., but it’s not hard to imagine OceanBase playing the same role elsewhere around the globe. That possibility could help whet investor appetites for Ant Group’s impending massive IPO.