What are Alipay and WeChat Pay? The difference between Alipay and WeChat Pay

Alipay and WeChat Pay are the 2 biggest mobile payments in China. In this post, FinFan will share with you the definitions of Alipay and WeChat Pay, how they work, and the difference between them.

What are Alipay and WeChat Pay?

What is Alipay?

Alipay is a payment app and e-wallet, allowing users to send and receive money easily without using cash. It is also a super app, meaning that it also has countless other features that allow users to hail a taxi, get a credit card and even buy insurance. And with over a billion users, offering this payment method is a natural choice for those who want to make international payments work.

How Alipay works?

In Vietnam, we have the same business modal as Alipay – MoMo, which has become the first choice of e-wallet in the Vietnam market. The most difference between Alipay and MoMo is that MoMo doesn’t have its e-commerce trading floor or isn’t a child company in any of this field companies, while Alipay is a subsidiary of Alibaba Group (the company owns Alibaba e-commerce exchange).

Because of this, users can connect their credit or debit cards with their Alipay e-wallet accounts and use them for paying firstly for the products/services online through the Alibaba e-commerce trading floor.

Then just like MoMo in Vietnam, Alipay tries to connect with more and more life’s services for instance: mobile cards, travel agencies/aggregator apps, insurance, school/electric/ hydroponic water bills, etc., and Senior Heads of Banking Industries in and outside of China to bring its trading system to users around the world.

Till today Alipay has around more than 1 billion users focusing on China, HongKong, Singapore, and Malaysia markets.

What is WeChat Pay?

WeChat Pay is a payment feature that is integrated within the WeChat app. While the fact that this feature is part of the larger WeChat app is unique, the overall digital wallet concept is similar to that of Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Just like Alipay, WeChat Pay also allows users to quickly make payments with their smartphones and leave their physical wallets at home.

In Vietnam, we have the same business modal as WeChat Pay – Zalo Pay, which is integrated into the biggest and most users active messaging app named Zalo.

WeChat Pay is used daily by Chinese citizens domestically and abroad, with over 800 million monthly active users. Both consumers and merchants appreciate the security and ease of use.

What are the differences between Alipay and WeChat Pay?

Although Alipay and WeChat Pay work in the same field of fintech – creating e-wallets with the same highest purpose “payment without cash and touch”. Alipay and WeChat Pay still have differences between them.

First is the difference between their holding companies’ main industries.

While Alipay is owned by Jack Ma and Alibaba, the biggest e-commerce exchange in China, WeChat Pay’s owner is the president of the biggest technology group in China – Tencent, which also owns TikTok, WeChat and some famous games on Appstore and Google Play such as Activision Blizzard, World of Craft, and Candy Crush.

Second is the difference between their oriented development.

With this difference between their main industries, Alipay and WeChat Pay has different ways to grow.

Alibaba has a mission of growing connections between its main customers, who one side are the bosses of small and medium companies or stores, and on the other side are online shopping people.

So, this group desires to build the ecosystem around the main industry such as the live streaming academy, expressing the products, digital media and entertainment, etc.

And Payment is one of those. Alibaba Group understands that without Alipay, when buying something on the internet, you must enter your card information before ending the payments. This action has many personal information security risks.

On the other hand, Tencent with the start of messaging app - WeChat, has built WeChat Pay relying on the convenience of texts.

Imagine that you want to send money while texting. Normally in this case, you must exit the messaging app and make a money transfer with the other app such as Alipay or other banking apps. To solve this solution, WeChat Pay was created.

Now all you need to do is use the integrated small app on WeChat then the money transfer order will be executed immediately and will not interrupt your conversation.

The last one is the global market size to develop.

Alibaba is focusing on the Asia Pacific, especially the Southeast Asia market due to the direct competition of the biggest e-commerce exchange platform Amazon in the other markets.

*Entering the market through way of buying shares, and establishing a joint venture is a familiar step that Alipay has taken in India and many Southeast Asian countries.

Specifically, after spending $ 1 billion to acquire the leading online shopping channel Lazada in 2016, in April 2017, Alibaba acquired the online payment segment of Lazada (HelloPay), which was operating in Indonesia and Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.*

On the other side, WeChat Pay with the benefit of a messaging app for Chinese people around the world can be developed outside the Asia Pacific.

**By the end of 2018, WeChat Pay was accepted in 49 countries and regions and could settle payments in 16 currencies, according to company figures.

 

Previous adopters of the comprehensive WeChat solution include Japan's Fuji-Q Highland amusement park. Since July, the park has introduced a small program that introduces facilities in Chinese, offers special offers, and supports mobile payments settled in the renminbi.

Fan Wei, overseas business manager of WeChat Pay said that WeChat Pay will remain focused on serving foreign tourists instead of delving deeper into the development of local payment wallets in overseas markets, as the payment function is mainly derived from the popularity and large user base in China.**

*Sourced by baodautu.vn

**Sourced by chuyentienviettrung.vn

Will Alipay and WeChat Pay move toward the Vietnamese market?

In the article Re-opening Chinese Tourists is helping Alipay, Wechat Pay go back to Vietnam, FinFan mentioned this problem.