Technology

Stripe announces deal with two of China’s biggest digital payment services

Move gives firm access to hundreds of millions of Chinese customers

Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO at Stripe. Firm provides software that lets businesses accept payments online, and offers tools to help with data security, fraud prevention, accounting, and billing. Photograph: Albert Gea/Reuters

Mon Jul 10 2017 - 17:31

Stripe unveiled a partnership deal with two of China’s biggest digital payment services, giving the San Francisco-based start-up access to hundreds of millions of Chinese customers.

Businesses that use Stripe, founded by Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison, can now accept Alipay and WeChat as payment methods on their websites, according to a statement from Stripe. Stripe provides software that lets businesses accept payments online, and offers tools to help with data security, fraud prevention, accounting, and billing.

“By deepening our existing partnership with Alipay, we’re enabling businesses around the world to instantly access the once-impenetrable Chinese consumer market,” said John Collison, Stripe’s president.

Alipay, part of Ant Financial, an Alibaba Group Holding affiliate, and Tencent Holdings 's WeChat Pay, dominate the mobile-payments market in China with a combined 90 per cent share. Alipay is used by about half a billion Chinese shoppers.

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Partnership

Its mobile wallet is already accepted by more than 100,000 retailers in 70 international markets. The partnership with Stripe will aid Alibaba’s efforts to attract more US businesses and feed the Chinese consumer’s increasing appetite for foreign goods.

Ant Financial has been expanding abroad, offering $1.2 billion for the US money-transfer service MoneyGram International. Earlier this year, it struck a deal that lets Alipay users shop at 4 million US merchants served by payments processor First Data.

In seven years, Stripe has grown into a global company valued at $9.2 billion. Stripe's first clients were small US technology companies, but now it has users in more than 100 countries, including Asia. It's won over larger enterprises, including Facebook, Target and Macy's . Part of the money from its latest $150 million round of financing from November was meant to be used to fund faster international growth.

– (Bloomberg)

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