Ingenico Offers New Connection for Chinese Mobile Payments Users

While dealing with China has never been quite so controversial as it has been lately—just ask the folks at Tegridy Farms!—it still represents a source of opportunity many businesses can ill afford to overlook. Ingenico, meanwhile, tipped us off about a move it recently made to open up the Chinese consumer to products of other lands, rolling out support for all currently-available use cases for WeChat Pay.

Ingenico is actually one of the first international payment service providers to offer up such tools, including the ability to connect to both WeChat Official Accounts and Mini-Programs. Thanks to this, WeChat’s 1.1 billion active users can now connect to mobile payments systems and complete a purchase without having to first leave the WeChat environment. That puts it on par with a “buy button” or similar tool, and should make things substantially more convenient.

It’s not just WeChat, though, that gets the Ingenico touch. It’s also recently stepped up its Alipay integrations as well as both SecurePay and ExpressPay offered via UnionPay.

Ingenico’s senior vice president for global online, Gabriel de Montessus, noted “Our long-time presence and activity in China means that we are perfectly positioned to partner with merchants wanting to access the truly local consumer market. Our expertise here, combined with this new set of payment capabilities, will allow international merchants to reach Chinese consumers that were previously difficult to access.”

While business with China is still a controversial process—it’s hard to do business openly with a country that’s willing to ban Winnie the Pooh over his vague resemblance to President Xi—it’s still a huge opportunity. This is a country with nearly four times the entire United States’ population, one that accounts for one in four internet users worldwide. Though that experience is heavily censored and even connected to one’s social mobility, it’s still a big opportunity. Making it easier to make purchases abroad is vital for companies, and Ingenico’s operations look to go a long way in improving ease-of-use levels, particularly given local rules, regulations, and customs that make setting up shop a complex process.

The old adage about selling shovels in a gold rush certainly applies here, and Ingenico may have one of the best shovel shops in the gold fields going forward.