E.Sun Commercial Bank (玉山銀行) and Alipay (支付寶) yesterday launched a joint cross-border payment service catering to Chinese tourists, who have grown accustomed to using mobile payments over online-to-offline (O2O) platforms.
Alipay, an affiliate of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴), is the world’s largest mobile payment service provider with 400 million users. It processes more than 120 million transactions daily, accounting for about 80 percent of the market in China.
“In addition to regulations and technology, user behavior is the most important factor affecting the proliferation of new payment methods, and we are happy to make the familiar and convenient service available for Chinese visitors during their stay in Taiwan,” E.Sun Financial president Joseph Huang (黃男州) said at a launch event in Taipei.
“Unlike credit cards or other electronic payments, the new service can be run on smartphones,” Huang said.
“It does not require additional hardware, such as desktop terminals, which should boost consumer and business adoption, especially among night market vendors,” Huang said.
It is predicted that the service is likely to be integrated into point-of-sale (POS) systems at large-scale retailers. Chinese visitors are likely to enjoy slightly more favorable exchange rates using the service compared with banks’ daily rates, he said.
The service is to online today at more than 3,500 stores, including vendors at a number of popular shopping districts and night markets.
The service can also be used where iPass cards (一卡通) are accepted, according to E.Sun Bank.
Huang estimates that the number of stores using the service nationally is likely to exceed 10,000 before the end of next year.
In light of the three decades it took for credit cards to see widespread adoption, the company hopes to see electronic payments account for more than half of the nation’s day-to-day transactions within the next five years, Huang said.
“Once the cross-border O2O infrastructure is established, the service can be rolled out quickly,” he said.
Earlier this month, the banking arms of Yuanta Financial Holding Co (元大金控) and First Financial Holding Co (第一金控) said that they had received regulatory approval to launch their own O2O services in Taiwan.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said the DRAM supply crunch could extend through 2028, as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom has led the world’s major memory makers to dramatically reduce production of standard DRAM and allocate a significant portion of their capacity for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. The most severe supply constraints would stretch to the first half of next year due to “very limited” increases in new DRAM capacity worldwide, Nanya Technology president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told a news briefing. The company plans to increase monthly 12-inch wafer capacity to 20,000 in the first half of 2028 after a
Taiwan has enough crude oil reserves for more than 100 days and sufficient natural gas reserves for more than 11 days, both above the regulatory safety requirement, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said yesterday, adding that the government would prioritize domestic price stability as conflicts in the Middle East continue. Overall, energy supply for this month is secure, and the government is continuing efforts to ensure sufficient supply for next month, Kung told reporters after meeting with representatives from business groups at the ministry in Taipei. The ministry has been holding daily cross-ministry meetings at the Executive Yuan to ensure
Property transactions in the nation’s six special municipalities plunged last month, as a lengthy Lunar New Year holiday combined with ongoing credit tightening dampened housing market activity, data compiled by local land administration offices released on Monday showed. The six cities recorded a total of 10,480 property transfers last month, down 42.5 percent from January and marking the second-lowest monthly level on record, the data showed. “The sharp drop largely reflected seasonal factors and tighter credit conditions,” Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) deputy research manager Chen Chin-ping (陳金萍) said. The nine-day Lunar New Year holiday fell in February this year, reducing
RSS