New | Alipay targets Chinese tourists with US payment deals

China’s Alipay is expanding its mobile payment app service into the United States through partnerships with payment processors First Data and Verifone, the latest deals in a global strategy to reach Chinese consumers travelling abroad.

Alipay, which counts 450 million active users in China, is the top mobile payments player there. It is a unit of privately held ANT Financial, which is in turn an affiliate of publicly traded Chinese internet company Alibaba.com.

It has begun actively expanding outside China over the past year via partnerships in Asia and Europe. In Britain, for example, luxury department stores Harrods and Selfridges and retailers Holland & Barrett and the Body Shop now accept Alipay.

Instead of seeking to go head to head with major payments players outside its home market, Alipay targets the fast growing Chinese tourism market, which numbered 117 million travellers in 2014, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, and is forecast to double by 2020.

Through the Verifone deal announced on Monday, Alipay is targeting top-tier merchants across retail, luxury goods, health supplement and department stores. Verifone supplies more than 29 million payment devices and terminals worldwide. First Data serves more than six million business locations.