PayPal is planning to launch a wallet in China that will focus on cross-border payments and won’t directly compete with local firms Alipay and WeChat, Hannah Qiu, the China CEO for PayPal, told CNBC.
PayPal is the first foreign firm that has 100 percent ownership of a payments platform in China. Qiu discussed its plans for a domestic digital wallet during a panel session hosted by CNBC at the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan, China.
Qiu said that the company’s “future business” is targeting cross-border payments since its “value” primarily comes “from overseas.”
PayPal’s overseas market has a large network with more than 20 million corporate and over 377 million individual users, Qiu said during the forum.
“We have a large network of such users. Thus, what we need to do is to build a bridge, bringing good Chinese products overseas and taking good overseas products back to China.”
China’s mobile payments space is dominated by Tencent’s WeChat and Ant Group’s Alipay. Both FinTechs give their combined billion-plus users the ability to pay digitally using a phone, tablet, or desktop computer or at physical stores using a scannable barcode.
“We don’t have direct competition with local payment companies. Instead, we have a lot of cooperation with them. I’m not listing the companies’ names, but we have very deep cooperation with some local companies,” Qiu said.
PayPal finished its acquisition of China’s GoPay in January, giving it 100 percent ownership of the payments platform. It also was the first foreign company licensed to provide online payment services in China.
The U.S. FinTech headquartered in Silicon Valley had already owned a 70 percent interest in GoPay. The GoPay platform operated like PayPal and was licensed for digital and mobile transactions.
Qiu was named the head of PayPal’s business in China in August 2020 and was a former executive at OneConnect, the FinTech sector arm of insurer Ping An Group.
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