While Alibaba shifted its support towards Paytm, the largest third-party mobile service provider in India, Tencent shifted its focus on e-commerce and invested $1.4 billion in Flipkart, the largest Indian e-commerce platform. Besides, it is reported that FreeCharge and Mobikwik are under the pressure of Chinese investors to merge together.

The financial industry has always been a lifeline of a country’s economy, while payment also constitutes a key part of the industry. To maintain stability, governments may have the incentive to have large control over the sector. Therefore, WeChat Pay and Alipay will have to face another major challenge, especially when such policies may be adopted in even more countries and regions.

4. Competition with other foreign mobile payment service providers

In addition, since Alipay and WeChat Pay aren’t the only potent mobile payment service providers who eyed abroad, they also have to compete with other foreign third-party payment giants.

It is reported that Facebook’s WhatsApp is going to launch its own online payment service in India and plans to cooperate with the Indian government to enter this battle. Although Facebook doesn’t have much experience in mobile payment, it is still a strong competitor especially based on its rich resources as a social networking platform.

To some degree, WhatsApp is quite similar to WeChat. Since WeChat caught up thanks to its active social networks, one might expect that WhatsApp can repeat WeChat’s success, especially when it has a broader user base globally. As long as WhatsApp takes appropriate measures, it may take less time for WhatsApp, compared with WeChat, to rise into a major third-party mobile payment service provider around the world.

However, it is worth noticing that Facebook may not necessarily be at an advantage than WeChat and Alipay in terms of third-party payment technology. Likewise, although Samsung and Qualcomm are industry-leaders in terms of wireless charging technology, their Chinese counterparts such as Weie Tech and BYD don’t lag far behind them.

As is mentioned above, although Alipay and WeChat Pay look quite promising in their overseas expansion, they do have to face a couple of major obstacles.

Although both WeChat Pay and Alipay focus their attention mainly on tourism consumption at present and attempt to gradually extend into other services by making full use of their advantages, they do encounter some limits and setbacks. To some degree, the competition with PayPal and Facebook may pose an even greater challenge for them than tourist consumption.

Alipay aims to further expand its e-wallet business and make the same difference in the overseas and domestic markets, extending its influence from mobile payment to people’s life, e-commerce, financial management and business retailing.

WeChat, however, attempts to make breakthrough starting from people’s lives, especially social network. Although it’s impossible for WeChat to make much progress in the short term, especially faced with the competition and challenge from its rivals, it is likely that WeChat could achieve its goal one day, based on its rich experience in both social network and mobile payment.

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[The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @Shu Mileplease note source and hyperlink when reproduce.]

Translated by Levin Feng (Senior Translator at PAGE TO PAGE), working for TMTpost.