NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Both Ant Financial and Tencent Holdings have used their hundreds of millions of users, ready access to Chinese bank accounts, billions of yuan in subsidies for merchants and consumers and protected market status in China against Western competitors to build a combined mobile payments business valued in the trillions of U.S. dollars in transactions.
The internet giants, however, seem to be more keen to attribute the reasons for their growth to their “lifestyle” apps–of which payments is only one piece. Moreover, they say they bring big data to bear for merchants to reach consumers with targeted messages and offers before, during and after the sale.
Tencent, which says its popular message app, WeChat, has a billion users, made this pitch at the recent Money 20/20 Asia fintech show in Singapore, as it touted its expansion in China and more than two dozen markets outside the country. Tencent’s WeChat Pay, with around 40% of the huge mobile payments market in China, has been gaining on mobile payments leader Alipay, owned by Ant Financial, an Alibaba Group affiliate.
