Читать книгу Embedded Finance - Scarlett Sieber - Страница 30

Yassine Regragui, fintech specialist and expert on China, explains that China's development in fintech is very unique, as it started in 2003, 19 years ago, with Alipay that was an escrow service created to build trust between the buyers and sellers of the e-commerce platform Taobao. Over the years, Alipay became a Super App that is today used by nearly everyone in China. Alipay and its competitor, WeChat Pay, now represent over 90% of mobile payments in China, while their offering extends far beyond financial services into lifestyle. The lifestyle services offered by those payment apps are now used more than 50% of the time by users engaging within the Super App. While this is something very typical to China, we are now seeing similar use cases in Southeast Asia, in Europe, in the US, and in other countries, because these payment apps are expanding their services and taking part in the daily lives of their users. The natural integration of financial services in these Super Apps, along with the fact that Chinese consumers are accustomed to going to one place to meet most of their needs, positions China to be at the forefront of fintech innovation. This is in large part thanks to the Big Tech platforms leading the charge when it comes to financial innovation, a progressive regulator encouraging competition, and the banks that offered API-based services early on to enable Big Tech to connect to it.

China's speed of innovation and technological developments can be attributed to several factors. The first factor is that those who started these payment services are nonbanking companies, including Alibaba, an e-commerce platform and Tencent, a gaming or messaging platform, who built a relationship with their users. Many gamers in the US will be familiar with Tencent for their hit games including Fortnite and PubG. This relationship and Chinese cultural tendency of being more open to new services enable the fast and consistent adoption of the new services they deploy. The second factor focuses on the ecosystem. These two giants have many external services connected to their internal ecosystem (the Super Apps) which creates a halo effect and builds trust externally through their partner's brands. The last factor is the Chinese regulators’ openness and support to encourage more competitors to enter to stimulate innovation. By contrast, Western payment companies are kept out of the Chinese market, protecting the homegrown players.