Alipay (payment platform)
| Alipay | |||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 支付寶 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 支付宝 | ||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Zhīfùbǎo |
Alipay is a third-party online payment platform. It was launched in China in 2004 by Alibaba Group and its founder Jack Ma. According to an analyst research report, Alipay had the biggest market share in China with 400 million users and control of just under half of China's online payment market in October 2016. A now-retracted article in The Financialist claimed that Credit Suisse claimed that the total value of online transactions in China grew from an insignificant size in 2008 to around CNY 4 trillion (US$700 billion) in 2012.
Alipay is the world's largest mobile and online payments platform since 2014.
Alipay provides an escrow service, in which consumers can verify whether they are happy with goods they have bought before releasing money to the seller. This service was offered for what the company says are China's weak consumer protection laws, which have reduced consumer confidence in C2C and even B2C quality control.
Alipay claims it operates with more than 65 financial institutions including Visa and MasterCard to provide payment services for Taobao and Tmall as well as more than 460,000 Chinese businesses. Internationally, more than 300 worldwide merchants use Alipay to sell directly to consumers in China. It currently supports transactions in 14 major foreign currencies.
The PBOC, China's central bank, issued licensing regulations in June 2010 for third-party payment providers. It also issued separate guidelines for foreign-funded payment institutions. Because of this, Alipay, which accounts for half of China's non-bank online payment market, was restructured as a domestic company controlled by Alibaba CEO Jack Ma in order to facilitate the regulatory approval for the license. The 2010 transfer of Alipay's ownership was controversial, with media reports in 2011 that Yahoo! and Softbank (Alibaba Group's controlling shareholders) were not informed of the sale for nominal value. Chinese business publications Century Weekly criticised Ma, who stated that Alibaba Group's board of directors was aware of the transaction. The incident was criticised in foreign and Chinese media as harming foreign trust in making Chinese investments. The ownership dispute was resolved by Alibaba Group, Yahoo!, and Softbank in July 2011.
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