Alipay expanding services in the U.S.
October 31, 2016 Category Finance, Weekly
China’s Alipay is expanding its mobile payment app service into the United States through partnerships with payment processors First Data and Verifone to reach Chinese consumers traveling abroad. Alipay is targeting top-tier merchants across retail, luxury goods, health supplements and department stores. Verifone supplies more than 29 million payment devices and terminals worldwide. First Data serves more than six million business locations. Alipay has 450 million active users in China and is affiliated with Alibaba.com. Instead of competing head to head with major payments players in foreign markets, Alipay targets the fast growing Chinese tourism market, which numbered 117 million travelers in 2014. Alipay and rival WeChat, a unit of Tencent, together make up 90% of the Chinese mobile payments market. Sabrina Peng, President of Alipay International, said in a recent interview that her company’s ambition is to become a global payments provider over the next decade, with 60% of its transaction volume coming from outside China. “We are targeting two billion users in the next 10 years,” she said. French payment terminal supplier Ingenico announced in August an expanded deal with Alipay to allow merchants across Europe to use Ingenico’s payment gateway to accept payments from Alipay users visiting the region. The Alipay service is also being integrated into terminals from Concardis, a payments provider for merchants in German-speaking Europe. Wirecard, also from Germany, is developing a payment system that uses two-dimensional QR barcodes popular in China to help merchants across Europe accept payments from Alipay users. Alipay has a similar deal with mobile payments start-up Zapper in Britain to allow Chinese tourists to use QR codes in more than 1,000 restaurants there, the South China Morning Post reports.
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