Experts talk: Why can China Mobile Payment be far ahead?
Looking at China with Mobile Payment (Expert Interpretation)
German newspaper Le Monde reported that China’s cashless model has spread to the streets, and no other country bid farewell to paper money so quickly as China. Mobile payment makes people’s lives convenient and fast.
According to an article in the Russian magazine Expert, it is not new york or London that will decide the future of the payment system, but China. In 2016, the transaction volume of Alipay and WeChat reached 2.9 trillion US dollars, which is very close to half of the total sales of consumer goods in China.
The British "Guardian" Chinese website reported that in the past year, in order to compete for mobile payment market share, Alibaba and Tencent launched a big war. With the explosive growth of mobile payment in China, it has become increasingly burdensome to take a wallet when going out. The victory or defeat of this war is of great importance.
The US "Business Insider" website issued a document affirming the development prospect of mobile payment in China. According to the article, the scale of China’s mobile payment market far exceeds that of the United States and European countries.
■ Interviewed expert: Cheng Hua, Associate Professor, School of Economics, Renmin University of China.
Generally speaking, the rapid development and maturity of mobile payment benefits from the following aspects: first, the popularity of smart phones and the improvement of communication network infrastructure; Secondly, the development of financial infrastructure. Mobile payment requires banks to have mature and convenient online banking services, open interfaces and gateways for mobile payment through the Internet.
The most important reason is the great development of mobile payment service providers-non-traditional financial enterprises under the background of science and technology Internet. The global expansion of mobile payment relies not on traditional payment institutions such as commercial banks, but on high-tech Internet companies with large user groups such as Apple, Google in the United States, Alibaba and Tencent in China.
China’s mobile payment business attracts worldwide attention, leading the way, and has penetrated into all aspects of social life, which is largely promoted by super applications such as Alipay and WeChat.
On the one hand, Internet enterprises in China have built up a huge scale of users, forming a "network effect"-there are enough users and rich scenes, attracting more and more people to join. When these applications establish a huge user network, it is a natural transition to embed mobile payment services from existing services. On the other hand, Alipay and WeChat pay attention to the expansion and deep cultivation of usage scenarios. From the very beginning, mobile payment is deeply embedded in a scene, and in the process of offline development, people access products according to the different needs of people in each scene, thus going deep into daily life.
Nowadays, mobile payment in China is going abroad. The strong purchasing power of China tourists has led some popular tourist areas to cater to Chinese’s demands and provide mobile payment services. More importantly, China enterprises embed their own mobile payment services through overseas mergers and acquisitions, capital injection into platforms such as e-commerce and social networking. In September 2015, Alibaba injected capital into Paytm, India’s largest mobile payment and business platform, allowing local people to use the Indian version of Alipay. In the past three years, the company’s total annual transaction volume has increased rapidly, exceeding $29 billion, with a quarterly transaction volume of about 1 billion. The company plans to invest 50 billion Indian Rupee in the next three years to improve the service level of bank transfer and other payment facilities on its platform.
Recently, Lianchang International Banking Group, Malaysia’s second largest bank, announced that it will cooperate with Alipay’s parent company Ant Financial to develop a cashless payment application to help Malaysians realize "code consumption" and build a cashless society. At present, Alipay has officially entered 8 of the 10 ASEAN countries except Indonesia and Brunei, basically covering the Southeast Asian market.
The maturity of mobile payment in China has brought great challenges to banks and other traditional financial institutions, forcing them to think about how to eliminate market pain points, such as high tax rate, long time lag and inefficiency. China’s mobile payment service is inciting the world.
(Interview with Kang Pu)