The apps fuelling this cashless trend are Tencent's WeChat and Alibaba's Alipay. Launched in 2011, WeChat is a multi-function app based around a messaging system that incorporates WhatsApp and Twitter-like elements. The app is phenomenally popular in China—the majority of WeChat's roughly 889 million monthly-active users worldwide are based in the People's Republic. Chinese users of apps like WeChat tend to not be put off by the personal data storing and sharing that goes on in them. Snooping by authorities is pretty much accepted. [...]
Tencent says that over 600 million users use its mobile payment services, which include WeChat Pay; Reuters estimated that $556 billion worth of transactions were made via the app in 2016. Alipay, which functions in a similar way to WeChat Pay, has around 270 million monthly active users, with around 175 million transactions going through the service every day. [...]
Last month China Tech Insights released a report after polling Chinese WeChat users, that again underlined the rise of mobile payments. It found that in 2015, 65 percent of users spent less than 500 yuan ($73) a month through WeChat Pay, but in 2016 the figure had dropped to under 40 percent. Forty-five percent of users said they used WeChat Pay because they didn't carry cash, with around 60 and 55 percent saying they used it because it was "fast" and "easy" respectively.
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