Asian Market Sees Major Mobile Payments Drive

Two recent points came together at almost the same time to show us just how explosive the mobile payments market in Asia is getting.

First, Samsung Pay staged a significant new movement in Malaysia, while at the same time, China showed huge new gains in overall mobile payment use.

Recently, Samsung Pay took its first steps into Malaysia thanks to a partnership with Maybank. It was seen as a great potential move for mobile payments in a region where mobile banking was doing quite well, but mobile payments hadn’t really taken off.

Given that Samsung was the leading phone brand in Malaysia, it was indeed a great potential way to introduce a highly flexible mobile payment system—it’s long been Samsung Pay’s competitive advantage over Apple Pay that it could go where Apple couldn’t—by taking advantage of a substantial user pool already in place.

While Samsung was building a market in Malaysia, the market was much more established in China, but still rapidly gaining ground. In 2016, reports noted, better than two out of three Chinese mobile phone users—nearly 68 percent, reports noted—turned to a mobile device to make payments that year.

Based on word from the China Internet Network Information Center, 469 million users turned to mobile payments, representing not only the static percentage noted previously, but also a 31 percent gain over the previous year.

This isn’t all that’s going on in the region, of course, but it’s really just an object representation of what’s going on. With established markets gaining new ground and new markets coming into play, it’s clear there’s an appetite for mobile payments technology in the region.

The question is, how best to exploit this new market? It’s clear that some things are already working: starting out slowly, letting the market build likely amid positive word of mouth, and letting people get sufficiently acclimated to trusting the new system.

Carrying on with the positives should keep this burgeoning market alive and well. It’s a safe bet to say growth will continue in the region, and we’ll likely hear further reports about the net positives afoot before much longer has passed.