Alipay Teams Up With Range of Providers to Improve Mobile Payments Push in Europe

Interoperability! It’s one of the greatest words in the tech sphere, because it guarantees that your need to change will be as minimal as possible while still giving you access to the latest and greatest advances in the field. It’s also a word that Alipay is riding high on right now as it tipped us off about a move to improve its interoperability thanks to a range of European mobile wallet systems.

The tip filled us in on six of Europe’s biggest mobile wallet systems who are getting together with Alipay to advance a new quick response (QR) code digital payment system that will work in both Europe and China. Once this system is in place, travelers from China and in Europe will have access to a new payment option that’s easy to use and simplifies the whole concept of cross-border travel.

Working with Alipay on this one are Bluecode, Vipps, ePassi, Pivo, momo Pocket and Pagaqui, which together have a range of 10 separate European countries. These 10 countries expect to, in turn, make themselves more popular destinations for Chinese tourists as their own payment system of choice—one of the two biggest in the country—is more readily accepted therein. This represents the first such collaboration of its kind in Europe at last report, and opens up access to roughly 190,000 merchants on the continent.

Garbog sums it up here nicely; interoperability makes systems much easier to use in general, and mobile payments systems are no different. By working directly with mobile payments systems in those countries, Alipay has just opened up a whole lot of new options for its own users, and improved the chances that Chinese tourist cash will find its way into some off-the-beaten-path options in Europe. That in turn should improve revenue and give those countries a shot in the arm with new tax sources. Risk is minimal here as nothing really changes for the current users, and the new users just get a new option.

Interoperability can be a wonderful thing, and when it comes so readily, it’s hard not to see companies going after it. Even mobile payments systems can offer a note of interoperability to help keep things going, and Alipay has just demonstrated as much.