China Payments Research

In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal wrote about how although mobile payments are slow to take off in China, telephone or 'fixed-line' payments are actually doing quite well and actually hugely dwarfs mobile payments. When you consider the history of the 5 major banks and their alignment with particular sectors, it's no surprise that the Agricultural Bank of China would be leveraging this kind of business model, but what is interesting is the way that the model completely avoids mobile payments. It's almost as if the bank (industry?) in China is saying 'ok, so no standards on mobile, we'll innovate with what we have.' Which is actually not tremendously different that what we're seeing in other markets where the adoption of a consistent mobile payments standard seems inconsistent at best...

The 2nd Annual eTail Conference was held from 27th to 28th November, 2012 in Shanghai. Kapronasia was invited to attend the event to speak on a few payment related topics along with other industry experts. The conference's topics included e-commerce trends and strategies, cross border shopping challenges, and IT implementation on e-payment.

China Mobile, the biggest mobile network operator in China, continues to grow its mobile payment business which was first launched in 2010. At the end of September 2012, China Mobile had 60 million registered mobile payment users with a total transaction value of reached 25 billion RMB, 2.5 times as much as in 2011.

In 2012, other key players in China’s mobile payment market also expanded their business. At the end of October 2012, the number of China Telecom’s mobile payment users exceeded 8 million; China UnionPay also announced that so far it has 4 million mobile payment users, compared with 2 million in 2011. The data from Alipay (China’s biggest third-party payment company) showed that as of the end of May 2012, Alipay had 10 million users conducting payment through their mobile phone and the number was increasing by about 90,000 every day.

We expect that China’s mobile payment business will grow faster in the future, with the number of mobile users surging to 400 million in 2015.

Kapronasia is pleased to announce the next webinar in our ongoing series covering China's Financial Services Industry. The November 21st webinar will be looking at the current status and future development of China's Credit Card industry. More information on the webinar and information on how to register can be found here.

The webinar is free and open to all.

Kapronasia's 3rd Party Online Payment Industry webinar recording is now available in the webinar section of kapronasia.com. Thank you to everyone who attended. We hope you found it useful.

Please keep an eye out for Kapronasia's Q3 and Q4 webinars. 

Kapronasia's latest report looking at the state of China's 3rd Party Online Payments Industry is now available on Kapronasia.com under the research report section.

If you are a subscriber to Kapronasia's Banking Advisory Service, the report can be downloaded after you have logged into your account. If you are not a subscriber, but are interested in purchasing the report, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The recording of the 3rd Party Online Payment webinar is also available in the webinar section of the website.

Kapronasia's latest report looking at the state of China's Prepaid Card Industry is now available on Kapronasia.com under the research report section.

If you are a subscriber to Kapronasia's Banking Advisory Service, the report can be downloaded after you have logged into your account. If you are not a subscriber, but are interested in purchasing the report, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The recording of the Prepaid Card webinar is also available in the webinar section.

Kapronasia will be hosting a webinar on August 8th, 2012 looking at China's Online Payments market. 

For more information on the webinar, please see the webinar description here or to register directly, go here.

The webinar is complimentary and will be looking at aspects of Kapronasia's soon to be released Online Payments Market in China report.

A recording of Kapronasia's Prepaid Cards in China webinar is now available for viewing on Kapronasia.com. To access the recording, click on the webinar link at the top of the website.

Recently, a WTO dispute panel, in response to the recent US complaint, said China is breaking the WTO rules by maintaining CUP as a monopoly supplier for the clearing of certain types of RMB-denominated payment card transactions. The specific areas where the panel determined that China had discriminated against foreign bank card suppliers are that 1) China requires all payment cards issued in China to work with the CUP network and to carry its logo, and 2) China forces all payment terminals to accept CUP network.

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