There’s a lot of cool things that happen or become possible when you have a mobile payments environment like China, but it’s possible because of fairly special (and not necessarily desirable) market conditions and lack of regulation in China.
But yeah - I think there’s amazing things happening. It’s a bit of a shame that the discussion is regularly framed as ‘who is number one?’ - there’s some straight up great innovation, and there’s a lot of interesting adaptation and innovative use of existing tech to suit market conditions in China.
On the contrary, China has very tight (if not most) financial regulations. E.g. oversea transaction above ￥10,000 need to be reported to central bank.
IMHO The secret factor of mobile payments boom in China is infrastructure.
Central bank completed near real time cross bank clearing system decade ago. It requires very low fee, has no tech debt like the US. For example, the ACH works by uploading files to FTP and has at least one day delay. In China, it only costs few seconds with 0 fee. Internet giants (网联, Nets Union Clearing Corporation) are in the same position as banks (银联, Unionpay)
Bank infrastructure has been a minor factor at best in the adoption/explosion of mobile payments - we’re talking about Wechat and Alipay basically.
Mobile payments are starting to gaining traction in southeast asia. The market is like mainland china 5 years ago.
> we’re talking about Wechat and Alipay basically
Wechat and alipay both has bank level clearing. Very few people "get" that.