North American Bancard Gives Alipay New Access to Merchants

North American Bancard is known for its payment processing capabilities, particularly its Electronic Payment Exchange (EPX) system. The EPX, and by extension North American Bancard, is about to be a lot better known in China, where Alipay recently announced a new team-up with the company to bring its mobile payments system to the EPX.

With Alipay available for users on the EPX system, that means many more North American terminals and payment processing locations will be able to accept Alipay as a payment method. There won’t even be much call for the merchants to make much adjustment, reports suggest, as the technology should be adapted by December 2017.

The new operation will work with PayAnywhere, either the mobile app or the PayAnywhere Storefront, to let users to a camera or barcode scanner system to work with Alipay. Additionally, reports note, by the end of this year Alipay will be available as an option for both MICROS terminals and the entire Ingenico merchant terminal operation.

North American Bancard’s CEO Marc Gardner commented “Alipay has realized tremendous adoption among Chinese nationals and has quickly become their preferred omni-channel payment method. Our goal has always been to ensure that our merchants have every payment tool at their fingertips to attract customers both online and offline. Because of that, we are very pleased that Alipay decided to align with NAB to help enhance opportunities for merchants of all sizes, as millions of overseas customers continue to visit the U.S. every year.”

For anyone who doesn’t yet believe that Alipay is actively working to expand its operations into the entire planet, this may be the proof you need. We’ve seen several efforts like this undertaken by the company in recent months, and it shows no signs of letting up. At this point, even if WeChat Pay—Alipay’s primary competitor in China—were to move on the rest of the market, it would be following from so far behind that the head start Alipay enjoys now might be insurmountable.

Alipay is essentially just providing what the customers want, and doing quite the job of it. It’s likely to be better than most of its competitors, though, and we may see a shakeout in Chinese mobile payments because of this growing rift between the two leaders.