The war for mobile payments supremacy in the Chinese market has been marked by a lot of new entrants and plenty of competitors after a slice of this absolutely enormous market.

Two of the biggest competitors in the market so far are Tencent and Alibaba, and in a recent stare-down between the two, Tencent has seemed to blink first, giving some ground to Alibaba in the fight and reorganizing its efforts elsewhere.

Tencent had, not so long ago, started charging users to transfer funds between WeChat Pay and normal bank accounts, a move that didn’t strike many as a good idea.

Tencent had originally absorbed those charges itself, a move that means some very big fees for the company. Just in January, reports note, the company had spent 300 million renminbi—around $46 million U.S—just on bank transaction fees.

It was a move that brought operating losses “under control”, as noted by Tencent chairman Pony Ma.

It was also, however, a move that signaled that Tencent wasn’t going to push that hard for market share against Alipay, the Ant Financial / Alibaba mobile payments user.

Tencent, however, has another motive in adding the transfer fees: keeping cash inside the Tencent envelope.

If users are charged fees to get money out of the Tencent apps, then users are more likely to leave that cash there, or use the Tencent apps as a purchase vector.

That keeps cash—as noted by iResearch analyst Li Zhefeng-”inside the WeChat ecosystem.”

It’s not exactly the best news for Tencent; increased fees tends to make users consider alternatives more closely, and with a clear alternative like Alipay around that makes for a potentially huge market impact for Tencent.

While there are advantages to instituting such fees, those advantages come with huge potential downsides.

The loss of customers is perhaps the biggest, and though money will stay in the “WeChat ecosystem” longer, there may also be less of it to stick around. That’s not good news by any stretch.

Tencent’s made a major choice here, and only time will tell if it was the right one or not. It’s an extremely risky move, and one that may open up the field for Alipay.

The mobile payments market is packed with dynamic, risky options, and this case just illustrates that much.