101–110 of 359 posts
And while it's hard to connect your Wechat account to your bank account as a foreigner, it's like everything in China: If you have Guanxi it's no big deal. You just give cash or bank transfers to your friends and they send you Wechat money.
I had the most surreal experience in the Shenzhen airport the other day. I was out of cash, with only my credit cards and Android pay. There was no place in the entire airport that I could pay with Visa or Mastercard - the first time I felt truly helpless in China. Uber didn't work either. I was forced to set up WeChat pay, which works absolutely everywhere.
Where I see the cashless innovation failing deliver is where there is a state-owned enterprise providing a service. I was in Shenzhen on the weekend and had to use cash to pay for a one-time use token to catch the subway. Lining up to pay took a good 20 minutes by itself. The Shenzhen subway seems like an exact copy of Hong Kong's MTR, which uses the excellent and ubiquitous Octopus system. The MTR is its own entity…
The success of AliPay and WeChat Pay is mostly the result of a good banking infrastructure. Even before these services popping up, you already can transfer money from any bank to another bank instantly and with no fee (or a small fee, depending on the bank and your account type). PBoC has been pushing banks to make interbank transfer efficiently and cheaply for years. The new mobile payment systems just use the alrea…
But reduced security doesn't sound like a very good idea.
Born in China and moved to U.S. since college. In my observation, there are several reason for the boom in mobile payment in China that makes it hard to replicate. - Low transaction fee & minimal barrier. For merchants taking WeChat pay, the transaction fee seems to be a flat 0.6%, compared to 2%-3% in the U.S. For the food cart vendors and similar one man shops, they just use the person-to-person payment feature (li…
I'd love to know the historical reasons
Capitalism, and hence consumerism, is a relatively recent thing in China, dating only to the 80s. Therefore, the well-developed mechanism in the Western world that encourages and protects it are still lagging.
One significant aspect of it is consumer protection. Chargebacks are almost unheard of in China. Fraud protection is pretty much nonexistent. The results are twofold. First, security is an utmost concern, which explains the PIN-and-signature requirement in POS. Second, free of the responsibilities, banks can offer a much more attractive interchange rate.
Another aspect is credit is not as developed in China. Of course, culture plays a large part as well, as traditionally Chinese value saving over spending. Therefore, there aren't crazy cash back schemes that American banks offer (credit card points do exist, but nowhere as lucrative), and people don't lose anything by switching to mobile payment, which are basically prepaid cards.
These two situations are of course rapidly changing. Younger generations are much more willing to take credit (and you hear horror stories of young girls using their naked pictures as collateral), and more and more company realize consumer protection can be used as a competitive advantage. But mobile payment took foothold before traditional card did, so looks like they are here to stay.
Why isn't there a WeChat equivalent in the west?
Can confirm, in most supermarket, paying take literally one second. You pull out your phone and show your Alipay/WeChat QR code, the cashier scans it and 1 second later it's done. People paying in cash is a small minority Speeding up lines, they also can have more clients for less cashiers In France, most people pay with a bank card, the rest with cash. The process is longer and less user friendly
Does your QR code change from one transaction to next?
That's probably more traction than Google Pay or Apple's payment system ever got.
"Alipay, leader in online payments. 400,000,000 Users."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly what was said about Germany in the 1880s, and Japanese goods in the 1960s. It's the normal progression of truly developing economies.
Ignoring all copyright law? We're not talking about stuff that is cheaper equivalents which I'm fine with. The problem with China is counterfeiting brands. Say I make a charger and want people to think it's high quality. To do this, I spend 90% of effort on making it look exactly like an Apple charger. It even works, kind of, maybe once. This is a straight up scam, and the kind of crap that people knock China for. An…