Merchants Adopt Cloud QuickPass, Give Carnival November 11 An Extra Tech Flair

The November 11 shopping gala features big discounts and attractive promotions. This year, consumers will also benefit from a smoother payment experience.

Cloud QuickPass will officially debut as a payment method as part of this year’s Double 11 shopping extravaganza, a festival invented by the Alibaba Group.

This is the latest example of payment barriers being removed, after 85% of all merchants in Taobao said they accepted transactions through Cloud Quick-Pass.

In addition, American Express, the first foreign card organization to obtain a commercial bank card clearing license, also launched a Double 11 discount event through Alipay this year.

Digital payments, while ubiquitous in China, were previously a matter of choosing between Alipay, WeChat Pay, UnionPay, or some other mobile wallet.

Today, such barriers are abolished. For example, WeChat users only need to scan a Cloud QuickPass (offered by UnionPay) to make transactions a snap.

Alipay and WeChat Pay, which combine to cover more than 90% of the country’s third-party payments market transactions, said they are improving online and offline integration with China UnionPay to enable a seamless payment experience.

In the past, users of Taobao, Alibaba’s e-commerce portal, could only transact through its native Alipay mobile wallet by linking bank cards to Alipay accounts.

Such interconnectivity between tech companies is one of the latest steps in China’s antitrust campaigns to restore market order by curbing monopoly behavior, experts said.

Fan Yifei, vice-governor of the People’s Bank of China, told a payment and authorization forum in September that the orderly interconnectivity of payment interfaces between platform companies is helping to stimulate fair competition. and that exclusive and discriminatory payment arrangements should be prohibited.

The 2019-2021 Fintech development plan published in 2019 raised the issue of the interconnectivity of barcode payments by developing technical standards as well as forming a technical system for linking and unifying the coding rules of barcode payments.

Regulation always serves to strengthen the healthy and coordinated development of platform economies, not just to protect the interests of Internet giants, said Cao Zhongxiong, director of the Center for New Economy Research at the China Institute of China. development.

“The improved interconnectivity will promote Internet platforms to fuel the growth of manufacturing companies and smaller-scale businesses,” Cao said.

At the same time, it is essential that a stronger interconnection ensures the security of the real economy, industry and the protection of data privacy, he added.

Interconnectivity marks a crucial step in antitrust measures, which aim to tackle leading companies that hamper innovation and competition across industry barriers, said Pan Helin, Executive Dean of the Digital Economy Zhongnan Law and Economics University Research Institute.

“More legislation and supervision should be put in place to lower barriers to entry in order to provide micro, small and medium-sized enterprises with a level playing field,” said Pan.

At the same time, interconnectivity calls for more nuanced internet governance and tighter oversight.

“Interconnectivity brings new challenges. For example, it’s more likely that a malicious link containing a virus is accidentally opened in a more open Internet system. Then it comes down to the question of which company should take the lead. responsibility and how, ”said Pan. .

The enhanced interconnection should also take into account additional costs such as data collection and decryption, said Zhu Keli, founding dean of the National Institute for New Economy Research.

“The costs derived from privacy requirements might be affordable for large internet companies, but they could be prohibitive for SMEs. Therefore, more attention and policy direction should be given to the interests of smaller companies. “Zhu said.