Another Merchant Partner for Alipay in France

According to L’Usine digitale, a partnership is now in place between Alipay and Galeries Lafayette. This would materialise yet another opportunity for Ant Financial’s mobile payment service to keep reaching out for the French market and further challenge their main rival in Europe, Wechat Pay.

This partnership again sheds light on Alipay’s ambition to include more partners for the sake of their international development. The idea is to streamline purchases for Chinese tourists visiting France. Ant Financial’s mobile payment solution should also benefit from a soon to be release update of Ingenico’s POS devices at Galeries Lafayette.

Alipay tries to attract new merchants and make it easier for their users to pay from their familiar ecosystem while travelling abroad. There are two main reasons for this: meeting customers’ expectations and increasing payment volumes for Alipay, their partner stores and their partner acquiring institutions.

According to a study conducted by Nielsen, 131 million Chinese people travel abroad each year, and more than 90% would rather pay with their mobile phone while away. It then seems natural that Alipay and their rivals should seek to meet the needs expressed by their huge customer bases.

Comments – Alipay makes further progress in Europe

Just like Tencent with WeChat Pay, Ant Financial focuses on building a consistent European and global acceptance network. And again, just like their counterpart, they selected Galeries Lafayette to keep reaching out for France. Many brands have already shown interest in adding Alipay as a payment option: its potential in terms of customer acquisition is in fact outstanding (these brands include Printemps, Harrods, Sephora, Chanel, Prada, etc.). WeChat Pay, for its part, enjoys partnerships with BNP Paribas and Wirecard to aim for France and Europe. Alipay can count on Wirecard and Ingenico, too.

By way of reminder, Alipay landed in France through an initial agreement with Banque Edel in 2016. More recently, a partnership with First Data has been announced to help them address the American market. Alipay is established on 36 countries, including France, Germany, the UK (with Barclays), Italy (via UniCredit), and Spain (with BBVA).

Alipay claims roughly 600 million active users in China and outpaces WeChat Pay on their home market. These services originated by non-banking players greatly contribute to developing the mobile payment sector locally, and their influence finds echoes beyond their home country since their users are actually famous for being a travelling nation.