China’s domestic card scheme UnionPay is now the world’s biggest card payment scheme, see. The largest online payment scheme in China, Ant Payments with 450 million active customers, is pushing to go global.

Online and offline deals world-wide 

Ant Financial Services are striking deals world-wide to extend their coverage:

• a deal with Ingenico will allow users of Ant’s Alipay, China’s biggest online-payments platform by transaction volume, to access Ingenico’s network of offline merchants in Europe
• collaborated with Wirecard and Concardis to offer mobile-payment services to Chinese tourists in Germany, France, the U.K. and Italy
• invested in India’s Paytm, one of the country’s largest mobile-payment platforms
• increasingly being used for offline services as well, ranging from paying for taxi rides, e.g. deal with Uber, to buying groceries. 

Payment systems future

This is how domestic payment systems go global: deal by deal, country by country, and network by network. 

Remember this logo:

You may be seeing it on your web-sites and on your point of sale terminals sometime …….. Possibly sooner than you expect?

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CTMfile take: For corporate treasury departments, developoing a strategy on how to deal with multiple payment channels is becoming increasingly important. The new payment systems are opening up huge new markets.