Stripe unveiled a partnership deal with Alipay and WeChat, giving the San Francisco-based startup, and users of Stripe’s online payments services, access to hundreds of millions of Chinese customers, Bloomberg reports. Alipay and WeChat Pay, dominate the mobile-payments market in China with a combined 90% share. Alipay is used by about half a billion Chinese shoppers. Its mobile wallet is already accepted by more than 100,000 retailers in 70 international markets. The partnership with Stripe will aid Alibaba’s efforts to attract more US businesses and feed the Chinese consumer’s increasing appetite for foreign goods. Ant Financial has been expanding abroad, offering $1.2 billion for the US money-transfer service MoneyGram International Inc. Earlier this year, it struck a deal that lets Alipay users shop at 4 million US merchants served by payments processor First Data Corp. In seven years, Stripe has grown into a global company valued at $9.2 billion.
China Economic Review