Australia is becoming, increasingly, a haven for mobile payments. Tencent is making WeChat’s mobile wallet available to Chinese students in the country. The mobile payment system is being marketed to Chinese tourists and students studying abroad. The availability was announced this month by mobile payments firm Novatti, which is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and which saw its shares push higher in the wake of the announcement by 67 percent to A$0.20. The mobile payments firm stated that it had signed a pact with RoyalPay Australia, which is the first distributor in Australia for WeChat Wallet.
Novatti said that the new collaboration gives the firm a “new recurring revenue stream,” which helps play into the traditional target audience of Chinese tourists. Financial Times said that Novatti will garner a monthly fee and commission fees, tied in part to how much business is generated for WeChat. The statistics are encouraging — Australia is slated to see more than 1 million visitors from Mainland China through this year, and WeChat is now top of the list in terms of rollout, as retailers take on the service (Novatti estimates it will be thousands of retailers).
In other expansion in Australia, Alibaba is slated to open an office Down Under later this year. That could be viewed as staking a claim on Alipay in the region as a conduit to residential and business payments.