Mobility in payments is flourishing in China, with Visa now enabling its cardholders to use Apple Pay for overseas transactions—both in physical stores and online.

Widespread Cultural Acceptance

This feature will initially be available to Visa cardholders from major Chinese banks such as the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Bank of China, and Agricultural Bank of China. However, Visa plans to expand this capability to other institutions in the future.

Chinese users traveling or shopping internationally will thus gain another mobile payment option with Apple Pay. Mastercard is also reported to be preparing similar cross-border functionality for Apple Pay.

The Central Hub

In the U.S., Apple Pay remains the leading mobile wallet, with over 65.6 million users, largely due to the ongoing popularity of iPhones there.

Though Apple previously led China’s smartphone market—now overtaken by Huawei—it still accounts for only a small portion of the country’s mobile payment landscape, dominated by Alipay and WeChat Pay from Ant Group and Tencent respectively.

Both Alipay and WeChat Pay have seen great success due to China’s broad cultural acceptance of mobile payments. These services now offer international expansion strategies, like Alipay+ which supports cross-border transactions in various regions such as the Middle East and Latin America.

Alipay+ has processed approximately 2 billion cross-border payments last year for small- to medium-sized businesses. Ant International is working on integrating with other domestic payment systems across Southeast Asia and exporting the Alipay model there.

Much like they connect payments, identification documents, and tickets within a single platform in China, these mobile payment systems could potentially serve as central hubs for international transactions.