With Alipay and WeChat Pay, users don’t need to sign into a stand-alone bank or payments app when transacting. “Our challenge is to understand and integrate financial services into them,” he said. He’s been particularly interested in the linkages between loyalty and payments, and how customers spend their time on the app. “While WeChat, at its core, is very specific to the local market, we think we’re going to be seeing more customers spending time in these kinds of ecosystems,” said Gavin Michael, head of technology for Citi’s The fast growth and meshing of payments with ecosystems has made China a lab of sorts for banks eager to understand the threats and opportunities of a world dominated by mobile payments.Ĭiti’s consumer banking team in New York, which has long had a “mobile-first” strategy, is studying Chinese usage patterns, behaviors and analytic data in anticipation of similar ecosystems emerging in other markets.
WECHAT PAY INTERNATIONAL INSTALL
Not necessary to install or sign onto separate apps for each function.Īlipay, which touts itself as a “global lifestyle super-app,” has similar functionality. WeChat users can schedule doctor appointments, order food, hail rides and much more, all through "mini-apps" that reside on the core app. They benefit enormously from their association with WeChat and Alibaba, which have blossomed into full-blown digital “ecosystems” -Īlways-on hubs for managing the minutiae of daily life.Ī key feature of the ecosystems is the “app-within-an-app” concept. The two services have flourished by making mobile payments cheap and easy to use. (China UnionPay, the nation’s dominant card network, is a distant third in mobile market share.) It’s as if Amazon and Facebook were the major conduits for payments. WeChat, the nation’s must-have messaging and social-media app with more than 1 billion users. More than 90% of Chinese mobile payments run through Alipay and WeChat Pay, rival platforms backed by China’s two largest internet conglomerates - Alibaba, essentially the Amazon of China, and Tencent Holdings, owner of
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