WeChat Pay turns to US growth despite tariffs



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The East is heading to the West – this would be two Asian mobile pay apps. Alipay and WeChat Pay are the dominant mobile pay apps in China and have a combined base of more than 1 billion users. As reported in the following CNBC article, WeChat Pay wants to continue adding US merchant sites.

Tencent will step up its efforts to expand its WeChat Pay payment service in the US, said a leader of the Chinese technology giant CNBC

WeChat Pay allows users to show stores a barcode on their smartphone via the WeChat messaging app owned by Tencent. The store scans the bar code, allowing a user to pay for an item or service with a Chinese bank account. WeChat has more than one billion users and about 800 million of them use the WeChat Pay feature.

Tencent has focused on expanding the payment service abroad but has not tried to create a local version of WeChat for other countries. Instead, the company has focused on accepting WeChat Pay so that Chinese tourists can use the payment platform abroad.

And Tencent is about to announce that many stores in the United States will accept WeChat Pay later "(1965)" The United States is also a market we are focusing on now … after July, many merchants will accept WeChat Pay in the United States, "said Yin Jie, director of cross-border trading at WeChat Pay. CNBC said in an interview aired on television on Thursday.

"In fact now … at the airport and in some duty free shops, they already accept WeChat Pay … because (the) United States is a very big country and have a lot of merchants.

Last year, Tencent partnered with Citcon, a US-based mobile payment platform, to bring WeChat Pay to North America, but until now it has There were not many department stores accepting service.

Mercator wrote a recent research report on this topic, "Asian Mobile Payment Apps as a Way of Life: A Look at Alipay, Paytm and WeChat Pay In our view, these mobile pay apps do not pose a competitive threat to US payment service providers in the foreseeable future. Some inherited acquirers are partners with them, for example, First Data and Alipay. The main targets of Asian countries are Chinese tourists, business people and students visiting the United States. In the history, Tencent confirms this, but also indicates its interest for small traders. Unless they are frequented by Chinese visitors, there does not seem to be any opening in this retail segment. We'll know more in the next few years when we see how many point-of-sale terminals will accept Alipay and WeChat Pay

Overview by Raymond Pucci, Associate Director, Research Department at Mercator Advisory Group

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