Ant Financial, the Chinese payments company behind Alipay, is planning a third attempt to acquire U.S. money transfer service MoneyGram.
Ant Financial first applied to buy the money transfer service for U.S. review earlier in 2017 after months of negotiating for MoneyGram’s acquisition; that first application failed to gain security clearance from the Committee on Foreign Investment, or CFIUS, Reuters reported in July 2017.
Ant Financial refiled its application, and is now approaching the 75-day deadline for assessment for that second attempt. Should that deadline pass without approval, the company is planning to refile again.
CFIUS, which looks over acquisitions of U.S. companies by foreign players for national security, keeps its review process quite secretive. The committee had “objected to” at least nine applications by foreign buyers by July 20th of this year, Reuters reported.