Mobile payments continue meteoric rise

Use of China's mobile payment services has skyrocketed over the past five years, with total transactions covered reaching 277.39 trillion yuan ($41.51 trillion) in 2018 — a more than 27-fold increase from five years ago, according to the central bank.

A total of 60.53 billion mobile payment transactions were conducted last year, as a report released by the People's Bank of China Monday shows, while the figure was only 1.67 billion back in 2013.

From around 2013, with online payments dominant and mobile payments only nascent, to 2018, which saw mobile payments outpacing the domestic market, it is easy to observe a mobilization trend in payment structures, Xue Hongyan with the Suning Institute of Finance told Securities Daily.

The number of China's online payment deals has jumped from 23.67 billion in 2013 to 2018's 57.01 billion, and transaction value more than doubled to 2,126.3 trillion yuan in 2018 from 1,060.78 trillion yuan five years earlier.

Liu Gang, the founder of PayNews.net, a Hangzhou-based online news service focusing on China's mobile payment industry, said to Securities Daily he expects the run-up of cashless payments will maintain for three to five years until it takes up as much share of consumption as possible, as consumers incrementally wade farther into cashless payments.

Data from PBOC revealed banking financial institutions in 2018 conducted 220.31 billion deals in non-cash payments involving 3,768.67 trillion yuan, a rise of 36.94 percent and 0.23 percent year-on-year respectively.

In the same period non-banking payment institutions, mainly referring to third-party online payment service providers, had 530.61 billion deals, surging 85.05 percent, and the transaction volume was 208.07 trillion yuan, up 45.23 percent from the previous year. Mobile payment platforms Alipay and WeChat Pay occupy over 90 percent of market share.

By the end of 2018, a total of 424 commercial banks and 115 payment institutions were connected to a unified clearing platform set up by the Payment and Clearing Association of China, PBOC said.