Ant’s Alipay+ accelerates pace of global adoption as digital payments surge

Ant’s Alipay+ gains ground as retailers around the world embrace next
generation payment solutions

Alipay+, a major product introduced by Ant Group providing global cross-border mobile payments and marketing solutions, has been quickly gaining ground in both Europe and Asia, as demands for cashless payments surge and retailers rush to integrate Alipay+ for a better consumer experience.

Ant’s Alipay+ accelerates pace of global adoption

On Thursday, payment solutions provider Epay said it rolled out the new Alipay+ payment solution with a launch at German drugstore chain Müller. This partnership is targeting more than 1 billion users in the Asia-Pacific region as cross-border travel starts to resume this year.

It followed a similar move by Starpay, the Spanish company specializing in money
transfer services in Europe, who announced in late March that it successfully integrated Alipay+’s global cross-border mobile payment and marketing solutions. This will enable Starpay to better serve global consumers as the adoption of mobile payment continues to rapidly accelerate.

Alipay+ connects online and offline merchants with digital payment methods around the world. Users of these digital payment methods can make payments with their local
currencies to merchants enabled by Alipay+ without worrying about whether their
preferred payment channels are accepted by the merchants.

Following a [quick] one-time integration with Alipay+, merchants using Epay and
Starpay’s services can accept payments of users from major Asian digital wallets,
including Kakao Pay (Korea) and AlipayHK (Hong Kong SAR, China). In addition, a number of popular Southeast Asian mobile wallets, such as GCash (Philippines), TrueMoney (Thailand) and Touch ‘n Go (Malaysia), are now part of Alipay+’s existing network. This brings Alipay+’s total mobile-native consumer reach to 1.3 billion people globally.

Last month, San Marino became one of the latest European country to use Alipay+ after local Fintech partner BKN301 announced it would make the Alipay+ payment and marketing solutions available to nearly 95 percent of stores in San Marino. In February, Worldline, the European leader in the payments and transactional services
industry and No.4 player globally, also announced the integration of Alipay+, was first unveiled during the Inclusion Conference in Shanghai in September 2020 by Eric Jing, the Executive Chairman and CEO of Ant Group, who shared the use case of Huang’s Bakery.

The century-old Macao bakery was able to accept payments from multiple digital wallets, including Alipay, AlipayHK and Kakao Pay after integrating Alipay+’s payment solutions. This meant South Korean consumers using Kakao Pay could use their digital wallets to pay in Korean won, as they do at home, while merchants could receive payments in Macanese pataca in real-time.

Although many businesses were negatively impacted during the Covid pandemic, the last two years have forever changed the way people shop. It also fundamentally reshaped the retail industry’s evolving digital payment landscape, with many merchants preparing for the expected travel boom as borders have started to reopen.

According to the Global Payments Report for Financial Institutions and Merchants
released by Worldpay, a payment service provider under FIS, digital wallets comprised
48.6 percent of e-commerce transaction value globally in 2021, or just over US$2.6
trillion. Wallets are projected to rise to 52.5 percent of transaction value in 2025.
Research by Juniper and Boku also shows that Southeast Asia is expected to be the
fastest growing region, with the number of mobile wallets in use expected to grow 311%
from 2020 to almost 440 million by 2025 across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines,
Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Alipay+ has gained increasing popularity during this period in Asia – its key battleground – where mobile phone penetration is high and contactless payment is already a way of life thanks to the vibrant growth of local mobile wallets.
As the adoption mobile payments continues to accelerate across Asia, the rise in the
number of digital wallets and payment methods could cause inconveniences for
merchants and increase the operating costs for smaller players. Alipay+ integrates
multiple payment methods and gives every wallet an equal opportunity to access
merchants.

Most importantly, Alipay+ brings ease of use to merchants – they don’t need to make any operational changes and the payment method recognition is fully automatic.
This week, Razer Merchant Services (RMS), the B2B arm of American-Singaporean
FinTech company Razer, said that it is expanding its merchant offerings by integrating
Alipay+ solutions into more than 60,000 online and offline merchants across Malaysia. It followed Omise, a payments partner for online enterprises in Southeast Asia, which announced the integration of Alipay+ in January 2022.

At the end of 2021, Restaurant Brands International Inc, one of the world’s largest quick service restaurant companies and the owner of the Tim Hortons, Burger King and Popeyes brands, and Singapore payment service NETS integrated Alipay+ into their respective merchant portals.

See more Alipay stories here.