China’s mobile payments providers have enjoyed a meteoric success among the country's citizens, with Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay now dominating a market that saw Rmb277,000bn-worth ($40,000bn-worth) of transactions in 2018 alone, according to the central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC). This represents a 27-fold increase over five years, with WeChat Pay reporting 200 million daily users in November 2018, while AliPay claimed a total of 230 million daily users in January 2019.
The central bank also reported a growth in mobile payment transactions from 1.67 billion in 2014 to 60.53 billion in 2018. Having achieved a monopoly on the consumer payments area, these fintech behemoths are now contemplating how they can expand into China's other underserved banking areas.
