The Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial has given its Alipay mobile app an upgrade that will help transform it from a mobile wallet to a payments platform.
Meet Alipay 9.0, the mobile payments upgrade the company is calling the “super app.” What was formerly known as Alipay Wallet has undergone a significant upgrade that brings its users new features such as P2P payments, merchant loyalty and social messaging. The new interface is designed to help the mobile payment service help consumers pay for more products, while receiving discounts and allowing its users to become more social with each other — all within the app.
“The new Alipay app is no longer a wallet,” Fan Zhiming, President of Ant Financial’s payment business unit, said in a news release. “[It is a] platform which will change the way you shop, the way you spend and the way you manage your finances.”
Users can also gain access to Ant Financial’s money-market fund via the app, as well as other money-management tools.
The new interface is available both for iOS and Android and has two new tabs that can help its users keep organized on the app. The tabs are designated “merchants” or “friends” and can help users organize their financial needs and contacts better, Ant Financial noted in the release.
In its remarks about the new feature, Ant Financial explained that: “Through the Merchants tab, users can learn the locations of nearby restaurants and shops, get discounted coupons, and settle payments at merchants’ e-shops via Alipay, as they can when shopping online.”
Alipay enables users to pay at shops by having a merchant scan a barcode or QR code. Alipay local services are also going to be available with Koubei, which was a joint venture between Alibaba Group and Ant Financial to help market more local services. Koubei is an expansion of Alibaba/Alipay’s mobile business that seeks to blend the “real world” and “online” shopping experience into a single, fluid commerce event – mainly by focusing on restaurants and brick-and-mortar stores. On the platform, Ant Financial will provide merchants with tools.
And it will enable consumers to connect with those merchants (along with friends and family).
“Imagine a user as the center of one’s daily life and our app aims to ink the connections for them,” Zhiming added. “Whether it is money transfer, recommending a restaurant, we put you at center stage in Alipay 9.0.”
O2O is a natural expansion of Alibaba’s mobile business, as it works to navigate the switch to a digital commerce environment dominated not by computers but by devices. O2O services allow Alibaba to capture the attention of shoppers wherever they are, whenever they are shopping. An Alibaba customer in a brick-and-mortar shop can look to the Alibaba’s app discounts and promotions, use their Alipay wallets for purchases, or order goods from local stores for delivery.
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To check out what else is HOT in the world of payments, click here.
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