Wechat Pay lands in London's Camden, but can it take off?

Wechat Pay touched down in the UK on Wednesday, after being rolled out in London’s Camden Market – one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions.

It’s the latest in a series of ventures overseas by China’s most popular mobile payment platforms, but are they simply targeting Chinese tourists, or looking to compete with Western rivals to become the payment app of choice around the world?

By working with SafeCharge, an integrated payment services company, Tencent’s Wechat Pay is set to be adopted by around 1,000 small businesses in Camden Market – an area of north London popular with tourists and known for its quirky goods and food stalls.

With Chinese tourism to the UK growing every year – visitors from the country spent 91 million pounds (121 million US dollars) from January to March alone – authorities, major brands and small businesses are doing all they can to make themselves more attractive to China’s consumers.

With more Chinese tourists visiting London, local businesses are doing what they can to get them to spend more.

To welcome even more Chinese tourists, “the more ways there are of paying, the better,” Camden Market operations director Ceri Davies told the Financial Times, which says 10 percent of visitors to the market were Chinese this year, up from five percent 12 months before.

It’s Wechat Pay’s first foray into the UK, and it comes on the heels of Alibaba’s Alipay, which has already convinced Harrod’s and Selfridge’s – two of London’s most famous luxury department stores – into offering its services to Chinese tourists.

Both payment platforms are already available in other countries popular with Chinese visitors, from Southeast Asia to France and Australia, but are they looking to go beyond tourists and bring their services to the rest of the world?

Tourism 'our primary focus'

Tencent told the Financial Times that “our primary focus is to better serve Chinese outbound tourists,” and that’s a message that Alipay appears to share, judging by their recent advertising campaign on the London Underground, which was almost entirely in Chinese.

Alipay's advert on the London Underground, October 1, 2017.

Elliott Zaagman, an executive coach and writer for SupChina, Tech in Asia, and Huxiu, told CGTN that similar ads on the Bangkok subway network don’t even feature any Thai at all, adding that while “in the long term they would like to have non-Chinese users,” both Alipay and Wechat Pay are focused primarily on Chinese tourists.

But do both Wechat Pay and Alipay have what it takes to entice new overseas users? Alipay has had more of an uptake internationally than its rival, especially among luxury brands and hotels, and that is likely down to security standards. While both payment platforms excel in China’s online ecosystem, Zaagman argues in an article for Tech in Asia that “outside of China, Wechat is like a fish out of water.”

Zaagman told CGTN that Alipay has more potential for foreign markets, because it could attract a user base looking to use the platform to sell to the Chinese market. Wechat on the other hand, as a primarily social platform, has “a lot of restrictions blocking foreign users from accessing Chinese users on Wechat.”

This means that there is little incentive for foreign businesses and companies to use Wechat, if they cannot directly interact with the Chinese market.

The lack of end-to-end encryption technology for Wechat means, according to Zaagman, that the app is potentially open to hacks and visible to third parties. Such vulnerability is not going to be a selling point for Western businesses and individuals to widely adopt Wechat, especially when Alipay’s reputation is first and foremost linked to e-commerce, rather than a messaging app.

Back in Camden Market, the launch of Wechat Pay may sound good to local authorities, but traders are skeptical, according to the Financial Times, which quotes one shopkeeper as saying there has never been a demand for Wechat, and that without it, Chinese tourists “would find another way to pay.“

(CGTN)