Basically Ant would like to be seen as a technology company, rather than a finance company, because these two are under different regulation. In theory, Ant acts as a broker to loans, and it is making profit without much risk. The new regulation would have been in discussion for months. My guess is that Ant knew about this new regulation which would hurt its valuation, and decided to go for IPO before this regulation come into effect. If the new regulation halves Ant's valuation, it is really not fair to the IPO investors. it makes sense to stop the IPO.

There was tens of huge P2P lending companies went burst with tens of thousand investors losing their money and protests happened after each event. This is the reason for the new regulation. That said, Ant group is in a very different league. Alipay owns a huge share of payment market in China, the data it is collecting can cover everything you do with money, I would think Ant's loan are safe and that's why banks are buying those loans from Ant.

Sometimes i feel maybe people are just trying too hard to read between the lines, Especially when it comes to anything China related. Maybe it really is just the fact Chinese government wasn't comfortable with the asset/loans ratio that ANT is proposing?