China third-party mobile payments climbs to $5.5 trillion

Driven by the explosive growth of Internet finance, China is now witnessing a boom on mobile payment market which touched a whopping $5.5 trillion last year.

Data showed that value of Chinese third-party mobile payments has tripled to 38 trillion yuan ($5.5 trillion) in 2016, state-run People's Daily reported today.

With the popularity of mobile payment, Chinese people can enjoy life without cash or cards as what they need is a mobile device, it said.

Even the farmers and herdsmen living in the remotest villages in Tibet can now use their cell phones to purchase daily necessities online since local administrative villages have been completely covered by communication signal.

A survey by Nieslen, a US-headquartered global information data and measurement company, showed that about 86% of Chinese consumers paid for online purchases with mobile apps, far outnumbering that of other countries, it said.

About 60% of Chinese consumers who use mobile payments enjoy paid via mobile apps every week, although most of those transactions are in small amounts, the Daily quoted a report released by China's Payment and Clearing Association.

Experts pointed out that the mobile payments brings great convenience to the small and micro-businesses.

Without complicated procedures or threshold, it can accelerate the transaction efficiency, it said.

Seeing the business opportunities, quite a number of Internet finance companies have begun to test water in the overseas market.

Alipay, a third-party online payment platform run by Ant Financial Services Group, an affiliate company of Alibaba Group, is now providing online payment and tax refund services for overseas Chinese tourists by teaming up with local payment agencies and businesses.

The platform, at the same time, has inked cooperation deals with payment service providers in countries like the US, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Brazil.

The "Internet finance" has been included in Chinese government's work report for three consecutive years since 2014.

It is expected that topics related to the agenda, including risk prevention and development direction, will be discussed at this year's annual sessions of China's parliament, the National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference as well, it said.