Alibaba was always pretty well known as an eCoommerce company in China, as well as for the recent fervor around its IPO. But recently, it’s been seeing a lot of gain in its mobile payment service, and some are wondering just how much connection these recent gains have to some talks being staged by the Alipay mobile payments service and tech powerhouse Apple.

While speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Alibaba noted that 54 percent of all the payments through Alipay for the period of January through October came from mobile device users, which itself represented a substantial gain as compared to the same time in 2013, where mobile accounted for 22 percent of transactions.

Alibaba, at last report, doesn’t actually own Alipay—that’s actually part of Ant Financial—but Alibaba executives are said to run the service and Alibaba’s CEO, Jack Ma, reportedly holds a minority stake in the firm as well, with the somewhat convoluted ownership and operations scheme reportedly owing to some of the Chinese government’s regulations.

Normally, huge gains don’t happen in isolation; there’s a principle that guides such gains.

Changes in the marketplace, changes in consumer attitudes, and other factors have the tendency to change a company’s bottom line. In this case, some are pointing to a potential deal in the making between Apple and Alibaba that would allow Alipay to provide back-end services for Apple’s new Apple Pay payment system, a deal that would allow Chinese users to put Apple Pay to work on current Apple devices—which are in turn a fairly major growth vector in China—while tapping the resources currently found in Alipay accounts.

This is especially noteworthy as, in China, the biggest demand for mobile payments comes from rural users, where said users often don’t have a desktop computer to handle payment tasks instead. Indeed, Alipay’s biggest market for mobile payments right now seems to be Tibet, where over 62 percent of all payments made came from mobile devices.

It’s fairly well known that Apple mobile devices have made quite the splash in China, where a newly-emerging middle class are starting to consider the devices not only as valuable technology, but also as a kind of status symbol.

So to suggest that Alipay and Apple Pay might get together in some way would certainly spark interest among the user base, and with good reason; after all, we’re talking here about a product a lot of people use coupled with a service a lot of people use. Put these two together and it’s practically a tailor-made recipe for success.

That in turn might explain why there have been significant gains in recent days; if people are aware that Alipay and Apple Pay may be getting together, that could be inspiring people to put Alipay to work so that they’re already registered with the system, and when Apple Pay swings in, the transition will be smoother overall.

The next several months will likely tell the story for Alipay and Apple Pay, but it’s clear nonetheless that mobile payments in China—and the rest of the world—are really taking off.

We may well reach a point before too much longer where our wallet and our mobile phone are one and the same, and that will pose some noteworthy challenges all its own. For now, however, mobile payments are making big gains, and a combination between Apple Pay and Alipay is likely to spark a new pack of users all on its own.