By Pan Yingqiu

WECHAT PAY HITS THAILAND

By Pan Yingqiu

Massively popular Chinese mobile payments platform looks beyond national borders

Guests enjoy a 40-percent discount on room rates if they use WeChat Pay at Dusit Thani hotels in Thailand.

WeChat Pay is now beginning to gain popularity abroad.

“Chinese tourists to Thailand no longer need to exchange money into Thai Baht,” exclaimed Jin Na, shortly after the Chinese national returned home from a business trip to Thailand. “I used WeChat Pay to pay for my hotel room in Thailand, and enjoyed a 40 percent discount offmy room rate, which even included breakfast.”

Already a ubiquitous payment method in China, where it is accepted everywhere from tiny street stalls to designer department stores, WeChat Pay is now beginning to gain popularity abroad. Simply by scanning a QR code with a smartphone, users can complete payments. But its jump abroad has only happened recently.

Apart from hotels, WeChat Pay is also available in many shopping malls and restaurants in Thailand, enabling users to enjoy a cashless experience throughout the country. The number of transactions carried out by Chinese tourists using WeChat Pay in Thailand so far in 2017 is six times more than the amount over the same period last year. The crossborder payment functionality of WeChat Pay enables Chinese tourists to pay with Chinese yuan abroad, which is automatically converted into foreign currency and delivered into foreign vendors’ accounts. In this way, tourists do not need to change currencies, and stores don’t need to prepare small change.

Cashless Payments Boom

“Since we began accepting WeChat Pay, our restaurant’s customer traffic flow has increased by 30 percent. What a delightful surprise!” said Kreimuk, who runs a Thai restaurant in Chiang Mai, a tourist city known as “Rose of the North” in Thailand.

During the 2017 Chinese Spring Festival holiday, Thailand was the most popular overseas destination for Chinese tourists, who were seen everywhere at Thailand’s tourist resort towns such as Pattaya and Phuket. Thailand’s popularity among Chinese tourists is in part attributable to the expansion of Thailand’s visa-free policy for Chinese tourists as well as the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative.

The popularity of WeChat Pay during the Spring Festival holiday helped it win over more Thai vendors. Many decided to implement the mobile payment method at their shops, hotels and restaurants. During the Thai Water-splashing Festival in April, daily WeChat payments once again reached a new high, growing by 38 percent compared to the Spring Festival holiday period.

Currently, WeChat Pay is available across Thailand, from franchised duty-free outlets in Bangkok to street vendors in Chiang Mai and Phuket. By November 2016, all 9,414 7-Eleven stores in Thailand had introduced WeChat Pay, making cashless payments available in every corner of the country.

As the largest duty-free retailer in Thailand, King Power owns four stores in four major cities as well as five airport outlets. The Bangkok store is the most popular among Chinese travelers, who account for 80 percent of its total customer traffic.

Kuang Wei, a marketing manager with King Power, noted that since King Power introduced WeChat Pay last year, Chinese customers have found it just as easy to purchase items at Thai King Power stores as it is to buy things at shops back home. Moreover, King Power has opened a WeChat official account and offers free WiFi to customers in store.

According to Geng Zhi, the supervisor of overseas payment services at Pineapple PASS (a WeChat Pay service provider), WeChat payments will once again shoot up during this year’s summer holiday as well as China’s National Day holiday, which falls on the week of Oct. 1.

A customer pays with WeChat Pay at a bar in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Mobile Payments Cooperation

In recent years, apart from local companies, international e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Alibaba have also competed to gain a foothold in Thailand’s growing online shopping market. Currently, the best-known Thai e-commerce companies include Lazada, Kaidee, WeLoveShopping and iTrueMart.

Cross-border payments can be carried out in various ways, such as payment via a vendor’s official WeChat account, payment via mobile apps or payment via scanning a vendor’s QR code or a customer’s individual QR code. When cooperating with overseas enterprises and institutions, WeChat Pay strictly follows the regulations of China’s central bank and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and abides by the Guiding Opinions on the Pilot Cross-border Foreign Exchange Payment Business of Payment Institutions and the administrative methods for third-party payments issued by China’s central bank.

Tencent, WeChat Pay’s parent company, has announced that WeChat Pay will maintain compliance with local authorities when it enters foreign markets, abide by local laws and regulations and perform strict management of service providers and vendors. Currently, WeChat Pay provides a payment safety system integrating payment quota controls, risk controls, channel encryption, webpage anti-phishing and equipment protection services. Furthermore, it has collaborated with PICC Property and Casualty Co., Ltd. to provide full coverage for losses of WeChat Pay users caused by cross-border payment issues 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The rapid development of WeChat Pay in Thailand has also created tremendous market opportunities for third-party service providers. Adopting the same strategies that have been used in China, WeChat Pay provides only basic payment solutions, leaving a huge piece of the market pie to its third-party partners who are familiar with overseas markets. Pineapple PASS originally specialized in overseas self-help and other travel-based services. After WeChat Pay went abroad, it began to shift its focus to cross-border payments based on its experience in overseas markets and advanced technology.

Geng revealed that WeChat Pay also went through a tough period in Thailand in which it was misunderstood and not widely accepted. However, it didn’t take long for it to grow.

“When a small number of vendors first began to provide the WeChat Pay service, they attracted more customers, and other vendors followed suit,” Geng said. “There was a snowball effect.”

Total Pineapple PASS sales volume on payments completed via WeChat Pay is 3.3 times higher than it was six months ago. WeChat Pay also provides software allowing users to check account information and book various services with their smartphones anytime, anywhere.

Following in the footsteps of Chinese tourists, WeChat Pay has penetrated every corner of Thailand. Tourists are now welcome to go anywhere without bringing their wallets. WeChat Pay is now used in 12 countries and regions and supports payments in 11 different currencies. Using popular tourist destinations in Southeast Asia as a jumping offpoint, WeChat Pay is expected to expand its business around the globe.