- All businesses with in-store NAB merchant terminals will be able to accept Alipay payments
- Chinese tourists, students and residents in Australia spend $11bn per year
- Move follows CustomLinc/PayPal deal to offer Alipay and WeChat Pay integration
The National Australia Bank (NAC) is about to attract lucrative business from the one million-plus tourists from China who visit Australia every year by enabling them to purchase goods and services “Down Under” using the massive Chinese Alipay service.
The service is scheduled to go live in early 2019 and will mean that businesses with a NAB merchant terminal will be able to accept Alipay payments in-store. They will also have access to Alipay’s marketing platform to promote their business, no minor advantage when the numbers come into view: Alipay boasts more that 870 million users who rely on the platform to transfer money internationally at competitive overseas transfer rates.
Commenting on the new offering, NAB’s Executive Director of Deposit and Transaction Services, Shane Conway, explained that the one million-plus Chinese tourists who visit Australia every year between them spend over AUD$11 billion. He continued: “By making China’s number one payment method available to NAB business customers, we’re enabling greater customer service and providing our business customers with access to this large tourism sector which is a win-win for everyone.
“We’re beginning pilot testing with a small group of business merchant customers in November, before making the payment system available to all merchants through existing point-of-sale terminals in early 2019.”
Expressing his delight at the new partnership with NAB, Alipay’s country manager of Australia and New Zealand, George Lawson, said that it would help the bank’s business customers across the country to benefit from the lucrative trade provided by the continually growing number of Chinese tourists.
He said: “China is now Australia’s largest tourism market accounting for 81 per cent of the growth in tourism spend in Australia in the last 12 months. Enabling seamless payments with Alipay represents a significant commercial opportunity for Australian businesses.”
Mr Lawson explained that the new partnership will allow tens of thousands of Australian merchants to turn-on Alipay seamlessly, reducing friction at the point of sale not only for vacationing Chinese tourists, but also for the rising number of Chinese students and residents in the country.
He also explained that Alipay’s service goes beyond enabling cross-border transactions: its marketing platform generates incremental customers and revenue as well. He underlined the fact that Alipay obviates the need to compare FX brokers by operating its own money transfer comparison and offering users the best exchange rates, alleviating anxieties associated with using a foreign currency in the process.
He added: “We expect this deal will give NAB a significant advantage among business owners wanting to capitalise on the China opportunity.”
The move follows another Australian milestone for Alipay. After the launch of the new Alipay-WeChat integrated interface at the TRENZ conference earlier this year, last week CustomLinc announced that this new payment method was now available in Oz via a partnership with PayPlus.
A fully integrated solution, the new deal gives Chinese customers in Australia the option to settle transactions using their preferred payment method, Alipay and WeChat Pay. In-store and web transactions are both supported and, as with the NAB deal, will help Australian businesses tap the full, and growing, potential of Chinese spending.
If you’ve enjoyed this article about Alipay, you may like another of our articles featuring the company here.
