Line launches mobile payment service to rival those of Alibaba, Apple and Tencent
Japanese messaging app Line to take on Alipay, Tenpay and Apple Pay in the increasingly competitive global mobile payments market.
Popular real-time messaging app Line, a direct competitor to Tencent’s WeChat and already popular with Hong Kong youth, is to expand its mobile payment system to global users, making it the latest Asian tech firm to enter that competitive market alongside Alibaba and Tencent.
Tokyo-based Line Corp said on Friday that it had reached a deal with payment management CyberSource to "facilitate the global growth" of Line Pay.
The service, which had its soft launch in December last year, enables users to send each other money wirelessly without sharing bank details and make purchases on Line’s e-commerce platforms.
Line Pay joins an already crowded market, with major competitors Alibaba, Tencent, and Apple all competing for a slice of the mobile payments pie.
AliPay, a subsidiary of the Chinese e-commerce giant which is used for purchase on digital marketplaces Taobao and Tmall, has more than 300 million users in China.
Chinese mobile payment providers processed more than 6 trillion yuan (US$960 billion) in payments in 2014, five times the previous year's total, according to iResearch. In comparison, payment providers in the US processed around US$52 billion last year, according to Forrester Research.
While the US mobile payment market has begun to heat up since the launch of Apple Pay in October, which now accounts for two-thirds of all US mobile payments, it still lags behind China in terms of vendor and user adoption.
TenPay, which is used for handling payments via the mainland's largest messaging app Tencent WeChat, has quickly become the second largest non-state payment processor since it launched its mobile payment service in October 2008.
Both services are now challenging Chinese state owned credit card issuer UnionPay for international payments by Chinese consumers. AliPay recently launched a major advertising campaign in Hong Kong encouraging Chinese tourists to use the service while in the city, where TenPay recently rolled out its first international expansion, along with Singapore and Indonesia.
"Financial services are the key to value creation across the entire business model for these companies, and mobile payments are at the core."