China CITIC Bank, the seventh-largest Chinese lender by assets, has become the latest financial institution to join a unique online payment system that promises to simplify electronic transactions for millions of Chinese Internet users.
China CITIC Bank on April 20 announced it had entered into a strategic cooperation agreement with Alipay, the country’s largest e-payments services provider, that includes the bank’s participation in the Kuai Jie Zhi Fu (literally, “Quick and Convenient Pay” or Quick Pay) service.
Introduced by Alipay late last year, Quick Pay was developed to address an impediment with China’s banking networks that hinders online shopping, said Jingming Li, vice president and chief technology officer for Alipay.com.
In the West, most consumers are able to complete online transactions using their credit cards, without ever leaving the merchant’s website. But in China, where credit cards have been uncommon until relatively recently, consumers face an inconvenient, two-step process. To complete a transaction, customers must switch from the retailer’s website to their bank’s website, where they must log in again in order to transfer funds to the vendor. Li says this is not only inconvenient; the extra step introduces additional security risks into every transaction.
“Our new product (Quick Pay) is solving these problems,” Li says. “Nobody in China has ever done this before.” Users of the service who have credit or debit cards through participating banks are able to enter their account information just once, without logging onto a bank website, to complete purchases. The service also eliminates obstacles such as transaction amount limits and browser compatibility issues among various websites. According to Alipay, a user’s chance of completing a successful online credit card payment in China was below 70%; using Quick Pay the success ratio is approximately 95%.
Quick Pay is attracting “tens of thousands of new users every day,” said Li. The servicecurrently works with cards issued by China CITIC Bank, Bank of China, China Construction Bank, and a handful of other banks.
Alipay is trying to negotiate agreements with all major Chinese financial institutions. In the past, some banks have been reluctant to partner with Alipay because theyconsider the e-payments provider as a potential competitor. But Quick Pay represents an alternative rather than a replacement for other ways of paying for Internet-purchased goods, Li said. “They see us as a strategic partner. Hopefully in the second half of the year all the major banks will be online with us.”
Alipay is China’s largest online payments platform with more than 550 million registered users. The service facilitated more than 8.5 million transactions daily at the end of 2010.
