Ant Group’s Alipay+ leads Chinese fintech giant’s overseas expansion as consumer spending in home market remains sluggish

Merchants using Alipay+ reached 2.5 million as of November, helping expand digital transactions in Japan, South Korea and across Southeast Asia

Rather than build another super app, Ant Group developed Alipay+ as a suite of global cross-border digital payments and marketing solutions

Reading Time:3 minutes

Ant Group’s overseas expansion via Alipay+ comes at a time when the company’s restructuring is proceeding at full speed. Photo: Handout

Published: 11:00am, 15 Jan 2023

When Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong visited the city state’s fintech festival in November, he assuredly got with the programme and bought his coffee online from popular local chain Huggs by using the Alipay+ QR code.

That order appeared to signify, in a nutshell, how Singapore has embraced digital transactions and the businesses that support them, as the country successfully emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic and all the disruptions it had caused.

“Covid-19 definitely was a catalyst that pushed us to digitise faster,” said Lee Hao Ming, managing director at Huggs, one of the largest specialty coffee brands in Singapore and a local partner of Alipay+ operator Ant Group. “We didn’t really use QR codes before Covid-19 … But it definitely made the whole country get used to scanning QR codes after the government put out this app to track everyone’s movement [during the pandemic].”

Ant Group’s collaboration with Huggs, which was founded in 2008 and has around 20 outlets across Singapore, was helped by the chain’s presence inside the same building that housed the Chinese financial technology giant’s offices in the city state, according to Lee.

Alipay+ has been actively promoting QR code connectivity in Hong Kong, South Korea and major markets across Southeast Asia. Photo: Handout

“I think that’s where Alipay+ reached out to me,” Lee said. “It was a very natural process when they introduced and shared their technology [with me], and what they are able to do. We see it as a good partnership.”