China Payments Research
Ant International further expands in Europe
Ant Group, under its Ant International arm, has been on a sustained international expansion campaign that increasingly encompasses Europe. While the company’s core cross-border payments business still targets Asia, it also sees opportunity further afield. On July 1, Ant announced that MultiSafePay, an Amsterdam-based payment service provider, had become its wholly-owned subsidiary and will integrate with the Chinese company’s Antom platform.
China’s fintech crackdown has been going on in some form or another since 2017. First, the cryptocurrency industry was hobbled. Then peer-to-peer (P2P) lending was reined in and effectively eliminated. The third act in this play has been the forced restructuring of China’s fintech giants, who have been accused of monopolistic practices – which is not untrue – but whose greater offense has been getting a little too large for their own good. Thus far, Alipay has fared much worse than Tencent’s fintech business, but one wonders if the omnipresence of the WeChat app might be a growing risk for the Shenzhen-based company. According to a recent Nikkei Asia report, it already is.
The limits of cashless payments in China
China’s cashless evolution is a remarkable story, as the country transitioned in less than two decades from a cash-first society to one with an 86% mobile payments penetration rate. The comprehensive ecosystems of Alipay and WeChat Pay have made payments in China among the most convenient and frictionless in the world with one important caveat: One must be within the domestic Chinese payments ecosystems, with a Chinese bank account that can be tied to the payment apps.
LianLian: the stealth Chinese fintech
Those who do not follow China’s payments sector closely may not have heard of LianLian Digitech, a Hangzhou-based fintech firm that presides over an ascendant cross-border payments network and counts among its strategic partners American Express. LianLian has leaned hard into market segments not dominated by the traditional Chinese payments duopoly of Alipay and Tenpay, whether by partnering with a global card giant like Amex on renminbi clearing in China’s domestic market or by capitalizing on a growing appetite among China’s e-commerce sector to do business overseas.
Alipay focuses on cross-border expansion
Alipay is continuing its cross-border expansion with new partnerships, including one with Mastercard focused on remittances. The company is at the same time steadily developing the Alipay+ platform and has its eye on expanding to Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy and one of the most important in Asia Pacific for fintech. While the various expansion efforts may not seem interconnected at first blush, there is a common theme: Alipay can no longer count on China’s domestic market for high margins and fast growth.
Ant International’s global expansion efforts have grown increasingly strategic since the launch of its Alipay+ and its pivot to boosting interoperability among e-wallets in Asia. While it is difficult to measure the financial success of these efforts, the growth of Ant’s international payments network in the last 18 months has been impressive and the company has smartly pared back its presence in certain markets due to geopolitical pressures. With international travel having recovered to pre-pandemic levels, Alipay+ likely has significant room to grow, especially in neighboring countries.
Alipay+ has an increasingly global vision
While regulatory uncertainty continues to hang over its domestic operations, Ant Group is not letting that get in the way of its ambitious global expansion of which the Alipay+ platform is a key part. The number of partnerships/tie-ups between Alipay+ and various entities is growing briskly and increasingly spans the whole of Asia, from Sri Lanka to Korea to the United Arab Emirates as well as Europe the United States.
Alipay+ doubles down on expansion
The fragmentation of e-wallets in Asia poses a challenge for any company trying to build a payments rail that can work smoothly throughout the region. With the exception of China, where a duopoly of Alipay and Tenpay still prevails, most Asian countries have dozens, if not tens of dozens, of digital payment methods. This holds true for the richest countries in the region like Japan and Singapore, as well as developing nations in South and Southeast Asia. For this reason, we are carefully observing the progress of Ant Group’s Alipay+ initiative in the region to see if it can achieve a breakthrough.
Can Alipay and WeChat Pay converge with the e-CNY?
Despite high expectations for China's digital currency, adoption of the e-CNY for retail payments in the country remains modest at best. A key issue, and one we have been discussing for several years now, is interoperability with the existing, very effective digital payments ecosystem. The e-CNY is unlikely to be more than a novelty unless it can be fully interoperable with Alipay and WeChat Pay.
Why Tencent lags Alipay in cross-border payments
In the mid-2010s, the fintech business of Tencent grew exponentially, with WeChat Pay and its offshoots allowing the company to become a viable competitor to Alipay in China. Yet even as Tencent captured close to half of China’s payments market, and established a digital bank, WeBank, that could rival Ant Group’s MYbank, it never displayed the same kind of appetite for global expansion as Jack Ma’s company.
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Baby steps for Tencent’s global fintech business
Like its rival Alibaba, Tencent has developed a large portfolio of overseas fintech investments. Some of these are strategic bets on rising Big Tech companies with fintech arms, like Voyager Innovations in the Philippines and Sea Group in Singapore, which Tencent believes will eventually be dominant players. Other investments are more focused on facilitating access to the mainland China market for fintechs that have a niche there, such as Australia-founded but Hong Kong-headquartered Airwallex.
Alipay+ feels like déjà vu all aver again
In the days before China’s tech crackdown humbled the country’s largest platform companies, Ant Group seemed intent on building its own cross-border payments ecosystem in Southeast Asia. The idea, though never explicitly stated, was to build a regional payments rail that could replicate at least some of the success of Alipay’s dominant domestic system.
China’s fintech crackdown has slowed the domestic growth of the country’s biggest platform companies, but they remain committed to international expansion through strategic investments. Tencent has a number of key investments in Southeast Asia, Australia and UK that are worth watching, including its stakes in Sea Group, Voyager Innovations, Airwallex, Afterpay and most recently the UK fintech Previse.
How are AmEx’s prospects in China shaping up?
U.S. credit card firms have waited many years to be granted substantive access to the China market. In the meantime, China’s state-owned payments giant UnionPay has built a card empire in the country, while Alibaba and Tencent have come to dominate digital payments. Among U.S. card companies, American Express is the only one currently permitted to process renminbi transactions, having gained regulatory approval in June 2020.