, Columnist
China’s Payment Duopoly May Struggle to Survive
Standardized QR codes to promote the digital yuan could weaken the stranglehold of Alipay and WeChat Pay.
A push for a standardized QR code to promote the digital yuan may bust China’s payment duopoly.
Photographer: Gilles Sabrie/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Alipay and WeChat Pay’s dominance of China’s retail payments was scripted over the past decade on the back of the humble quick recognition code. The same dotted squares could now start to undermine their moat.
Fan Yifei, a deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, said at a recent forum on digital finance that it was necessary to standardize, among other things, the two-dimensional barcodes so that “merchants can support various payment tools without increasing costs.”