Opinion | Alipay to expand alliance with US payment processing giant First Data

Alipay, mainland China’s biggest online and mobile payments platform, plans to kick its international expansion into high gear by extending its partnership with US payment processor First Data Corp to cover a network of more than six million retailers and 4,000 financial institutions around the world.

That could potentially make Hangzhou-based Alipay the de facto mobile payments service for a majority of mainland Chinese outbound tourists, the numbers of which are forecast to hit the 200-million mark by 2020.

The broader, more ambitious scope of the recently announced alliance between Alipay and First Data was disclosed by senior executives of the two companies in separate interviews with the South China Morning Post.

“We have taken a global approach with our First Data partnership. We are both global providers and will leverage our capabilities in the appropriate regions,” said Souheil Badran, the president at Alipay North America.

First Data and Alipay, a unit of Ant Financial Services Group, jointly announced their North American partnership earlier this month, which would support mobile payments by more than four million Chinese tourists who visit the United States and Canada every year.

Ant Financial is an affiliate of New York-listed e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the Post.