The barriers between China’s two leading mobile payment systems may have started to fall after Ant Group’s Alipay rolled out a trial service that uses a QR code to enable the transfer of funds to users of rival app WeChat, reports the South China Morning Post.
While direct money transfers between the two apps is still not possible despite Beijing’s calls to dismantle the “walled gardens” operated by China’s Big Tech firms, the new service from Alipay—only available to a limited number of users in a trial run—marks a small step towards bridging the two mutually exclusive payment services, which together account for over 90 per cent of China’s mobile payments market.
To carry out the transaction, Alipay users generate a QR code after specifying the amount up to a maximum of RMB 2,000 ($278) per transfer. The code is shared with the WeChat user, who then must use Alipay to scan the code and receive the funds.
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