PayPal plans to launch a local wallet in China

April 21, 2021: -PayPal is planning to set up a local wallet in China focused on cross-border payments. The U.S. fintech company is the first foreign firm in January with 100% ownership of a payment platform in China. But until now, PayPal didn’t unveil any of its plans.

Hannah Qiu, the China CEO for PayPal, told CNBC that the company is planning to launch a domestic wallet. Instead of competing with the players like Alipay and WeChat Pay for domestic payments, PayPal will focus on cross-border payments. In a CNBC panel session at the Boao Forum for Asia in the province of Hainan in China, Qiu explained the plans.

“Our future business is mainly on the cross-border transaction. Our value is more from overseas. In our overseas market, there are over 377 million individual users and over 20 million corporate users,” Qiu said in Mandarin remarks translated by CNBC.

“We have a large network of such users. Thus, what we need to do is to build a bridge, bringing good Chinese products overseas and taking good overseas products back to China,” he added.

With over a billion users among them, Ant group of Alibaba affiliate-owned Tencent’s WeChat and Alipay dominate China’s domestic mobile payments market. These apps allow users to pay online or in stores. At physical stores, users show a barcode that the merchant scans to take a payment. Qiu said PayPal would not compete with these two services.

“We don’t have direct competition with local payment companies. Instead, we have a lot of cooperation with them. I’m not listing the companies’ names, but we have intense cooperation with some local companies,” Qiu said.