54% of Alipay transactions take place on smartphones as China's banking goes mobile
Alipay has announced that mobile transactions accounted for 54 per cent of the firm’s business in the first ten months of 2014.
Alipay is China's widest used payment app
The payment branch of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, owned by Jack Ma, the country’s richest man with a personal fortune of $25bn, announced the mobile boom on Monday.
However, Ant Financial Services Group, the firm which owns Alipay, did not share how many transactions mobile actually accounted for in the announcement. It added that 55 per cent of all mobile transactions were made in cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong.
The figure could be indicative of China’s mobile potential as a whole as Alipay is the nation’s biggest payment service provider.
In October, Ma said during a tour of America that he was seeking a "marriage" between Apple and Alipay. This could see the firms work together to introduce Apple Pay, a near-field communications mobile payment service, to China.