Huawei, UnionPay Step Up Partnership Efforts

January 31, 2018         By: Steven Anderson

We don’t hear near as much out of UnionPay as we do out of WeChat Pay, and certainly not a fraction of what we hear from Alipay. UnionPay isn’t going to be counted out of the market so lightly, however, and has recently set up an expansion to its partnership efforts with Huawei to bring more capability to the platform.

Under the terms of the agreement, those who are using Huawei phones—also Honor phones—will be able to add UnionPay bank cards to phones with Huawei Pay already enabled. Then, when the phones are placed near a point of sale terminal that supports UnionPay, said Huawei and Honor users will be able to make a payment as needed. The combined system uses a tokenization feature for added security, which should be welcome for those users.

Huawei Pay isn’t exactly a major operation—it counts 66 banks to its credit and works with 20 mobile devices—but it’s working to expand. With the new partnership operations, it will soon count Russia as part of the picture, which is great news since 85 percent of Russia accepts UnionPay bank cards. An additional 400,000 point of sale terminals in the country take quick payments from UnionPay, so the move is a hand-in-glove affair.

Huawei consumer cloud services president Zhang Ping’an noted “Open sharing is an important direction for the future of digital economy and intellectual interconnection, which is why Huawei end-user cloud services build an open and globalized smart mobile ecosystem for the end users. Huawei hopes to work with partners such as UnionPay International to provide more secure and convenient mobile payment services to each and every user of Huawei smart device around the world.”

The chances of UnionPay surpassing Alipay right now are astronomically low, and its chances of even beating WeChat Pay are low. However, as many firms have discovered over the years, you don’t have to be number one to make a living. It’s entirely possible that UnionPay can keep up enough business in a couple of regions to make its operations worthwhile and keep it a noteworthy footnote in the overall mobile payments market.

Moves like this, meanwhile, help secure UnionPay’s overall place in the scheme of things: not a particularly big deal, but present nonetheless. This won’t be a move that gets UnionPay to the top, but it will likely keep it in the game, and that’s not bad.