BNP Paribas : Mobile payment conquers China

Mobile payments quickly conquered China in just a few years. In 2015, 65% of online transactions were made on a mobile phone, according to an Alipay study published in January 2016. Credit and debit cards have suffered from the success of e-commerce: one in five consumers owns one of these cards, but few use cards to pay for online purchases. On the contrary, mobile phones have become the perfect partner for e-commerce, m-commerce and, soon enough, everyday life in China. Paying by scanning a QR Code from a smartphone, both in stores and at automated distributors, is now an everyday habit.

Various players are now battling it out to win over the enthusiasts of mobile payments. Alipay, the uncontested leader in the field, now has 450 million active users (compared with 200 million for Tenpay, WeChat's integrated payment solution) and carries out 170 million transactions a day.

Users are eager to test out new services on the market: when ApplePay hit China in February 2016, 30 million people signed up in the first few days alone. That enthusiasm has prompted other mobile phone makers to develop their own payment solutions: Samsung Pay, LG Pay and Huawei Pay, for example.