Stripe Launches in Hong Kong, Announces Partnerships With WeChat Pay and Alipay

Stripe, one of the world’s largest fintech unicorns, has finally landed in Hong Kong, and apparently, it did so in a big way.

In a blog post on their website, Stripe announced that not only have they officially launched in Hong Kong, they’ve also teamed up with China’s most dominant players in the payments industry: Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay.

As we’ve previously reported, these two companies practically command China’s mobile payments market. In 2016, WeChat Pay alone boasted over 800 million active daily users, while Alipay by its lonesome transacted over 170 million transactions per day. Combined, the two conducted an estimated $2.9 trillion in payments last year. Their competitors? They had to divvy up $300 billion between them.

That’s not to say that Stripe will be getting a large piece of that action though, the deal is to simply connect “Stripe businesses in 25+ countries to the hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers that actively use these payment methods,” so yes, while still very lucrative, the partnerships really don’t do much for Stripe in China.

Still though, the tie-ups do open a lot of potential revenue for the SF-based payment enabler. Here’s Reuters:

“If you are an internet business this unlocks a new vast customer base,” John Collison, Stripe’s president and co-founder, said in an interview. In turn, Chinese consumers will have expanded choice as to which international online merchants they can purchase products and services from, he added.

“If we can help a business double their sales, then it doubles our revenue from that business,” Collison said.

Photo: Sinchen.Lin