Cashing in on the cashless boom

World
Europe

This vegetable market in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou is a lot like other vegetable markets in the country: loud, lively, and soon nearly cashless. It was one of the first vegetable markets to go cashless in China.

Now, convenience has been taken one step further. At K-pro, a KFC concept store located in a busy shopping mall in Hangzhou, facial recognition is being used as a payment method, allowing customers to pay simply by looking into a camera.

China’s mobile payment market has seen an eye-popping 20-fold increase over the past four years. Mobile payment is used for everything from a bag of rice to credit card bills and stays at upscale hotels. This massive change is reshaping the lives of people in China's smaller cities and countryside.

A tale of two giants

A pioneer in China’s e-payment industry, Alipay was first established by e-commerce giant Alibaba to support its site Taobao.com in 2003. Five years later it launched its mobile payment service.

While Alipay thrived among Alibaba’s huge online shopping force, another mobile payment giant has taken a completely different path on its rise to dominance.

Launched in 2013, WeChat Pay is a relative latecomer compared with Alipay. By leveraging the user base of the omnipresent messaging app, WeChat Pay has been able to quickly close the gap and now has an average of 900 million daily users.

Global drive paying off

As the mobile payment giants continue to reshape ways of life in China, they are also actively seeking global expansion, as demand soars in the overseas market.

On the one hand, China’s continuous flows of outbound tourists have generated growing demand for mobile payments in tourism destinations. On the other hand, the payment giants are also exporting their know-how to countries and regions that are hungry for a cashless transformation.

The Chinese payment giants have worked with overseas retailers to facilitate their catering to visiting Chinese consumers, while providing a range of support to local mobile payment companies to launch their own products.