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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. 
"UnionPay is not a rival for TenPay, but an object TenPay means to replace," Guo Xingmei, an international business manager at iPaynow, a Beijing-based payments firm that acts as an agent for TenPay abroad, told the South China Morning Post last month. 
Despite the surprise merger last month of the firms' taxi-booking apps in the face of competition from US giant Uber, Alibaba and Tencent are still fierce rivals, particularly in the mobile payment field. 
Tencent recently banned Alipay from its WeChat messaging app, and over the Lunar New Year the two companies went head-to-head in encouraging users to send digital "red packets" to each other via their services. 

WeChat has proven the first real challenger to Alipay's dominance of the Chinese market, and increased competition from Apple Pay and Line Pay will also hurt Alibaba's expansion overseas. Worst still for the e-commerce giant, Apple is planning to enter China in the near future via a partnership with UnionPay. 
"This is a fight for the future of the mobile internet," Zhang Yi, chief executive of iMedia Research, a consultancy focused on the mobile internet, told the Financial Times last month. 
"Financial services are the key to value creation across the entire business model for these companies, and mobile payments are at the core."


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Mobile payments

Line launches mobile payment service to rival those of Alibaba, Apple and Tencent

A promotional image for Line Pay featuring the company's mascots Brown and Cony. Photo: Line Corp

A child plays next to mascots for the messaging app Line, which has recently launched a mobile payments service. Photo: EPA

Commuters walk past an Alipay Wallet advertisement in Hong Kong's Causeway Bay MTR station. Photo: David Wong

A taxi passenger in Beijing uses Tenpay to pay for his ride via the Didi Dache phone app. Photo: Xinhua

Apple Pay has been expanding aggressively and is trying to enter the Chinese market. Photo: Apple

Business

Banking & Finance

Japanese messaging app Line to take on Alipay, Tenpay and Apple Pay in the increasingly competitive global mobile payments market. 


Line launches mobile payment service to rival those of Alibaba, Apple and Tencent

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Japanese messaging app Line to take on Alipay, Tenpay and Apple Pay in the increasingly competitive global mobile payments market.

Japanese messaging app Line to take on Alipay, Tenpay and Apple Pay in the increasingly competitive global mobile payments market.