- China has embraced mobile payments like no other country.
- According to iResearch, China is now the biggest mobile payments market in the world.
Up until very recently, people were mostly using cash to pay for products and services in China, but mobile payments are slowly becoming ever-more popular. People are using them to pay for anything from restaurant bills to taxi fares with peer-to-peer transfer services such as Alipay and WeChat Pay.
WeChat Pay and Alipay are popular platforms for sending money that have 600 million and 800 million users respectively, with 66% of China’s third-party payments being conducted through them. The two companies are making their way into the Hong Kong and Singapore markets as well.
China UnionPay wants to compete, with plans to expand its 17% market share. In response to the popularity of Alipay and WeChat Pay, the bank is launching an integrated mobile payments service.
Alipay and WeChat Pay are not exclusive to China. In fact, their services are available in Southeast Asia and Europe.
- Find rates for sending money from China to the UK
During the last year, both of the payment companies launched an e-wallet service targeting the Asia Pacific markets. In January 2016, Tencent launched its WeChat Wallet feature. This allows users to synch their credit cards with the wallet as well as making money transfers to their friends and family members. Of course, it can also be used to make online payments.
Ant Financial, a company belonging to the Alibaba Group, has released its own wallet called AlipayHK. The wallet is meant for residents of Hong Kong only.
Wang Xiaofeng, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, believes it’s going to be hard to compete with Alipay and WeChat Pay. This is especially true if they manage to obtain licenses from regulators. He added that the speed of their service is another huge contributor to their widespread popularity.
