Displaying items by tag: third party payments

Rumours are swirling that Alibaba’s Taobao will collaborate with UnionPay. While details are still unknown, this partnership is noteworthy as Alibaba's online payments system Alipay and UnionPay have been fierce rivals for the past ten years.

Over the past few years, Alipay, WeChat, and other mobile financial and non-financial platforms have become ubiquitous in China. This ubiquity has led to a fiercely competitive market, so increasingly these companies have begun to look overseas, expanding into foreign markets including Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Although they are tremendously successful domestically, China's large tech players face multiple challenges when expanding abroad including regulation, which has become a real challenge for Tencent in Thailand as of late. 

Published in Asia Payments Research

The PBOC-backed 'Payments Clearing Association of China' published its annual report in May. We talked about some of the digital payments statistics from the report in our previous commentary, but the report also features ranking for China acquiring market, which is even more significant because such data has never been officially published before.

The Annual Payments Report by the Payment and Clearing Association of China was published on May 19th and showed the continuing growth in payment transactions in China. The total amount of online payments reached RMB 2,042 trillion, spread between commercial banks and payment service providers (PSPs).

As a growing number of foreign banks wind up operations in India, IT companies’ revenues from BFSI are growing slower than ever (21% in 2015 vs a projected 10% for 2016). Most IT majors derive a significant portion of their revenues from banking and insurance sectors - as high as 40% in some companies. However, this situation could improve with 'Payments Banks' (PB) set to roll out in the third quarter of 2016. 

There's a clearing platform in development that might change the playing field of the payments industry in China. The Payment and Clearing Association of China had a member congress in April and has approved a proposal to build an Internet payment clearing platform for non-bank payment institutions.

China’s mobile giant Huawei held a signing ceremony in Huawei's Shenzhen headquarters with Bank of China to co-develop next mobile based payment system Huawei Pay. This announcement was just released after Apple Pay and Samsung Pay claimed to make its entry in to China.

The recent move by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to initiate a ‘Unified Payment Interface (UPI)’ which aims to simplify and provide a single interface across all banking payment systems is a welcome decision. It is understood that 30 banks have evinced interest to commence UPI-based services in the new financial year (April 2016-March 2017) in India.

Recently a lawyer in China caused a stir in the payments industry by filing a complaint with the People's Bank of China (PBOC) on Meituan, China’s major O2O platform which is worth tens of USD billions. The complaint alleged that Meituan is engaged in payment settlement without having a required payments license.

The 11 applicants were given a go ahead last year by the RBI to start payments banking services in the country and are readying to start operations around the middle of this year. This will be the Indian central bank's first tryst with pure play fintech enabled service institutions in the country. This will also be a first for several of the licensees planning to operate in this space.

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