NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – While mobile payments are rolling out slowly at metro gates and aboard buses in the West, Chinese mobile payments players are accelerating deployments of their services that enable consumers to tap–or more likely scan–to ride.
Tencent Holdings, whose WeChat Pay service is part of the duopoly that dominates mobile payments in China along with Ant Financial’s Alipay, said at a conference this week that it has more than 50 million users across 100 Chinese cities for its “Ride Code” QR code-based service enabling users to pay for transit fares on buses and metros. That’s after launching the service only last year.
Meanwhile, Alibaba-affiliated Ant Financial recently announced an enhanced EasyGo service for transit payments in Hong Kong, while its QR code-based Alipay payments service already supports transit payments in more than 50 cities in China, with Alipay planning to expand that to more than 100 cities by next year, according to Caixin Media.