【视频】China Ready for a Cashless Future易玄算命网 ？（Part I） Is-上海外事商务咨询中心 三体三 On almost every street corner and in the ever-expanding ecommerce marketplace930e卡车 , businesses in China have already fully embraced the convenience of mobile payment. But as th

【视频】China Ready for a Cashless Future易玄算命网 ？（Part I） Is-上海外事商务咨询中心

三体三
On almost every street corner and in the ever-expanding ecommerce marketplace930e卡车 , businesses in China have already fully embraced the convenience of mobile payment. But as the nation dashes full speed ahead in the direction of becoming a cashless society绝世霸尊 , have we fully considered the pros and cons of digitizing our bills and coins?
Scan and Go

Carrying a Physical Wallet in a ‘QR Code First Economy’ Like China is a Hassle
For everyday transactions, a smartphone and an Alipay or We Chat Pay account connected to your local bank account are basically all you need. To pay, you just have to scan the merchants’ QR code with these apps点易通 , or have them scan yours. Easy, breezy.
“Maybe about seven out of 10 people scan QR codes to pay. Others use their cards,” says Ji, the middle-aged ayi(阿姨)from Hunan who manages the corner store next to my apartment while I scan the QR code displayed on the counter with We Chat to pay for some fruit. “I receive cash maybe just a handful of times a week.” Moments later, a robotic female voice from her Xiaomi smartphone declares, “Payment is successful超级全才 , 13yuan.” Ayi（阿姨）switches her focus back to a soap opera on her Tudou app.
Ben Cavender, principal atChina Market Research(CMR), believes that besides the added convenience for consumers and merchants与宋同行 , timing has played a critical role in propelling the Middle Kingdom and its 1.4 billion citizens ahead of the rest of the world in mobile payment adoption.
“The growth of China’s middle-class population coincided with the rising popularity of smartphones,” he explains from his Shanghai office. “People who didn’t previously own any electronic goods suddenly have iPhones in their hands. It’s their primary tool and initiation point for technology, whereas in the West, a lot of older consumers who grew up with their desktops and laptops still primarily use those for their online activities.”
At present, China’s two major players in the mobile payment space, Alipay and We Chat Pay, hold about 54 and 40 percent of the market share respectively, according to a 2017 Research report.China Channelcofounder Matthew Brennan attributes their dominance to the strengths of their parent companies, ecommerce giant Alibaba, and Tencent, the world’s most valuable social network conglomerate.

Since its introduction in 2004蓬安中学 , Alipay has always been the preferred payment solution for any Taobao or Tmall purchases. For nearly a decade延中盐汽水 , Alipay enjoyed almost a total monopoly in China’s electronic payment game until We Chat Pay came along in 2013.
Competition heated up when Tencent collaborated with the CCTV Spring Festival Gala to launch We Chat Red Envelope on Chinese New Year’s Eve of 2015. The infamous publicity stunt resulted in 1 billion hongbao(红包)transactions across the nation, making the platform a formidable opponent to Alipay.
With We Chat being China’s dominant instant messaging platform, Cavender says its offerings resonate with how today’s Chinese consumers use the internet and social media, hence its ‘stickiness’ makes it slightly easier to integrate with people’s daily lives.
Brennan adds慕璎珞 , “Both platforms, however, have successfully adapted themselves into the virtual world and into the offline economy… at the end of the day张馨云 , I don’t think it’s about one winning or losingdnf伊尔本 , as both are well-equipped to thrive in the market.”
A Tighter Leash

The US might be the world’s largest economy, but when it comes to mobile payment, the Chinese are way ahead.China’s total mobile payment transaction revenue was 50 times more than their American counterparts in 2016. Meanwhile东甲岛 , 52 percent of Chinese say less than 20 percent of their monthly transactions are conducted with bills and coins, according to the ‘2017 Mobile Payment Usage in China’ study published by China Tech Insights.
Credit card companies and many Westerners’ ingrained habit of using cards as their primary payment option have prevented mobile payments from taking off, according to Brennan and Cavender. In a country where Visa沙建微 , MasterCard and American Express still have yet to fully penetrate through the masses, Chinese consumers were able to easily move on from cash and plug themselves directly into the ecosystem that Alipay and We Chat Pay have created.
The downside of this arrangement, Cavender points out, is that tech companies are not held to the same fiduciary standards that traditional financial institutions follow: “At the end of the day, your money is being handled by companies whose main objective is to sell you all sorts of services. There’s definitely a conflict of interest [that works against consumers].”
By signing up for We Chat Pay or Alipay, users are not only giving Tencent and Alibaba instant access to their online shopping behaviors, but also their offline spending habits too真命天师 , not to mention their personal identity information and how much savings they have in their bank accounts.

The government七汉影视 , which was originally quite hands off during the early stages of the development of mobile payment platforms, has another concern. Up until recently, Alipay and We Chat Pay transactions were set up so that they could deal directly with individual banks while bypassing the central bank’s clearing system entirely.
By June 30, 2018,张梦瑾 however, third-party online payment companies and commercial banks will have to migrate this whole process to a People’s Bank of China-backed platform called Wanglian (Non-Bank Internet Payment Union)姬鹏飞之子 , which essentially allows Chinese monetary authorities to monitor all mobile transactions and data to prevent money laundering, tax evasion or other illegal activities in real time. The migration process had already begun in October 2017, as ordered by the national bank.
Hypothetically, if China were to become 100-percent cashless in the future, this would mean that in addition to having the transaction records between people and businesses, the government would also know the exact amount of money in circulation薛安克 , and perhaps even be able to monitor the outflow of capital.

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