China's Financial Opening Up: Global third-party payment firm eyes Chinese market

World
Europe

02:10

China has quickened the pace of the opening up of its financial industry in recent months and one notable example of the changes is in the payment sector. Our Yang Chengxi takes a closer look.

Most Chinese have gotten used to paying for everything with their smart phones. Third-party payments is a sector that's dominated by China's two biggest tech firms Tencent and Alibaba. It's also one of the few finance sectors that until March hadn't been opened to global companies. The British firm World First applied for a license in May.

JEFF PARKER, APAC MANAGING DIRECTOR WORLDFIRST "Last year in 2017 World First successfully registered as a wholly owned foreign operating entity in China, which was really the precursor to, I guess the discussion about holding a full license."

YANG CHENGXI SHANGHAI "Experts say that China's third-party payment technologies are already world class. The question now becomes: can the market make room for new players from overseas?"

QIAN JUN, EXECUTIVE DEAN FANHAI INT'L SCHOOL OF FINANCE, FUDAN UNIVERSITY "The answer is yes, it's always possible because the market in China is so big. Two, the Chinese market, as you will see the overall trend of the financial system is being more and more integrated with the global system."

WorldFirst serves 160 thousand clients globally. The company says that while their competitors in China focus on domestic consumer payments, their edge would be in the cross-border sector.

JEFF PARKER, APAC MANAGING DIRECTOR WORLDFIRST "WorldFirst focuses, or plans to focus on that cross-border piece. On the e-commerce side alone, the market is around 675 billion US dollars globally, with more than half of that in the APEC region."

Another segment of World First's differentiation effort aims for the massive business to business sector.

JEFF PARKER, APAC MANAGING DIRECTOR WORLDFIRST "I think 4.3 trillion US dollars in China alone in terms of imports and exports with over 11 million SMEs residing within China."

Experts say cross-border payment is an area that Chinese companies like Ant Financial have been proactively expanding into by acquiring smaller service providers overseas, and that new comers like World First should prepare for fierce competition.

Yang Chengxi, CGTN, SHANGHAI.