With the deepening of globalization, WeChat Pay, as China’s leading mobile payment platform, has begun to deploy its payment services globally. This article will delve into how WeChat Pay has gradually built its global payment map through strategies such as cooperating with overseas institutions, launching localized wallet services, and deepening its cultivation in key markets.
Taking advantage of the popularity of May Day overseas travel, WeChat Pay has recently promoted a wave of “South Korea’s Busan subway city stations support WeChat Pay on all lines”, the whole product experience is not bad, you can directly use the domestic version of WeChat, pay RMB to take the Korean subway, airport express and other means of transportation, and at the same time you can also buy “USIM traffic card, prepaid card, scenic spot pass card” and other travel peripheral services.
“Hitting children on rainy days, idle is also idle”, taking advantage of this “May Day” I will dismantle the “WeChat global payment map” from the scene of Busan, South Korea.
01 QR code cross-border payment journey
Let’s take a “subway” to Busan, South Korea to introduce the entire cross-border acquiring journey of WeChat. The service launched by WeChat this time is still aimed at Chinese travel abroad, and you can buy a subway ticket on WeChat’s “Triplabo in Korea” mini program.
1.1. Operating entity
What does a product manager need to do?
In the process of a product from scratch, it is not easy to do a good job in the role of product manager, in addition to the well-known writing requirements, writing requirements, writing requirements, there are many things to do. The product manager is not what you think, but will only ask you for trouble, make a request:
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As you can see in the figure below, the operating entity behind the mini program “Triplabo in Korea” is an “overseas operating entity” called “Linktivity Korea.inc”.
Figure 1: Mini program of overseas entities
After inquiry, this mini program is an “overseas entity” that provides transportation and attraction tickets for Korean tourism in China.
1. Triplabo Korean Travel
It is a travel service platform for Chinese tourists, mainly through the WeChat mini program “Triplabo in Korea”. The platform supports users to purchase various transportation tickets and attraction tickets in South Korea online, and realizes electronic ticket scanning codes to enter the station without exchanging tickets, improving travel convenience.
2、Linktivity Korea
It is a company specializing in travel electronic ticketing solutions, providing online booking services for attraction tickets, transportation tickets and other tourism products. his parent company
3、Linktivity
It is a Japanese company that does online travel and ticketing, and was wholly established in South Korea in 2024. Linktivity Korea is mainly used to expand the Korean market.
Judging from the information provided by WeChat, “Korean Travel” is a brand of Linktivity to carry out ticketing activities in South Korea, but this is not the point, the point is that this overseas main account is overseas, and there are several layers of nesting dolls in the middle, let’s continue to look down.
1.2. Information flow for ticket purchases
Figure 2: Cross-border ticket purchase payment process
The overall payment process is still very smooth, from the selection of ticket types and quantities, as well as real-time conversion rates, to RMB acquiring, foreign exchange and successful payment, without any ketons and chains in one go.
In this transaction process, the biggest feature is that the “domestic version of WeChat” can be used to complete the “RMB purchase of Korean ticketing services”, which is very convenient. It eliminates the complicated processes of currency exchange and ticket purchase.
1.3. Capital flow for ticket purchase
The ticket is bought, how does the underlying funds go? Old fans should know my dismantling routine, which is to look at the bill.
Interestingly, there is an acquirer “ICB Co.LTD.” here, you can see that on my account bank bill, the merchant information is “ICB” the acquirer rather than the actual merchant “Linktivity”, which once again confirms that this is an “overseas entity” that does not open a payment account in China, but is represented by ICB.
Figure 3: WeChat bill and card issuer bill
ICB (Korea)
is a cross-border fintech company headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, focusing on providing diversified financial services to individual and corporate customers, including mobile payments, cross-border remittances, and logistics solutions. It holds a number of financial business licenses, including an electronic financial transaction operation license, a foreign currency exchange business operation license, a foreign currency exchange license, and a small additional remittance service license.
He is not only a partner of WeChat in South Korea, but also an official partner of Alipay in Korea, and is the first company to provide barcode payment services to Alipay. It can be said that the WeChat payment experience is so good thanks to the way Alipay gave him.
After reading the bill, we can build WeChat’s “complete capital flow of this overseas entity acquiring”.
Figure 4: Cross-border ticket purchase funding process
(1) Consumer payment: Consumers purchase tickets through the WeChat mini program, and WeChat (domestic version) checks the real-time price in South Korea by integrating the price query interface provided by WeChat International (WeChat), and guides customers to place orders.
(2) Acquiring and exchanging: WeChat completes the inter-bank acquiring of the card issuer through the UnionPay ACS account, and completes the exchange transaction with the PIA account of the cooperative bank through WeChat.
(3) Cross-border acquiring: After the exchange is successful, WeChat will synchronously forward the payment instruction to the overseas acquirer “CB Co. LTD.”, and record a pending payment to the merchant “Linktivity”.
(4) Generate QR code: After the merchant receives the payment result, the merchant generates a QR code for the consumer, and the consumer can make a payment in Korea
(5) Clearing of funds: Through day trading, UnionPay clears the RMB corresponding to the “WeChat ACS Reserve” to the “WeChat PIA account” of the exchange bank, and the exchange bank clears the “foreign currency” to the clearing bank of ICB through cross-border clearing. 1.4. Overseas exhibition code consumption
After purchasing tickets, consumers can scan the QR code to pay overseas. The specific process is not complicated, that is, the purchase process is going through from the overseas end.
Figure 5: WeChat APP cross-border display code payment
Consumers can directly overseas on WeChat (domestic version), and they can directly consume locally through the exhibition code. The transaction and funding process are as follows.
Figure 5: Cross-border QR code scanning payment process
(1) Exhibition code gate: When users pass through the gate, they can use the WeChat APP (domestic version) mini program to make exhibition code payment.
(2) Merchant confirmation ticket: The QR code information is transmitted to the local merchant After the merchant confirms the order, it can be forwarded to the local acquirer ICB for payment.
(3) Acquirer forwarding: ICB forwards the transaction information to WeChat, and WeChat confirms the deduction and returns the transaction result to ICB.
(4) Merchant verification of card coupons: After receiving the payment results, the local merchant will verify the card and coupon to the user, and notify the gate to release it, and the user can take the bus.
(5) Fund settlement process: The foreign currency funds that have been exchanged for foreign exchange are cleared to overseas acquirers by WeChat isomorphic cooperation, and the overseas acquirers finally settle to the merchant, and the merchant withdraws to their bank cards. 1.5. “Chinese flavor” product system
WeChat’s overseas payment product is super simple is an English version of WeChat Pay. He includes basic payment products and marketing products.
These products have very distinctive WeChat social ecological characteristics, and at a glance they look “for Chinese”. There is really nothing to analyze about this, this kind of product is only used by foreigners when collecting money from Chinese, and basically not used at other times.
Figure 6: WeChat’s basic payment product
Figure 7: WeChat’s marketing products
02 The territory of WeChat global payment
2.1. WeChat’s global business expansion
2.1.1. Coverage countries and transaction size
1) Coverage countries
According to public information, as of April 2025, WeChat cross-border payment has covered 74 countries and regions, supports settlement in 31 currencies, with more than 6 million overseas merchants and more than 1,000 cooperative overseas institutions. The main regions include: Hong Kong and Macao (penetration rate 78%), Japan and South Korea (90% duty-free shop access), Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia), Europe (20 countries through Stripe cooperative access) and other places.
2) Transaction size
There is no more direct official data on this, and the data disclosed through some self-media is as follows (for reference only)
In 2024, the cross-border transaction volume will exceed 3 trillion yuan, and it is expected to reach 12 trillion yuan in 2025, accounting for 28% of the global cross-border payment market share, with an average daily cross-border payment turnover of more than 8 billion US dollars and a peak number of 500,000 transactions in a single day.
2.1.2. Main scenarios and services
The main scenario of cross-border payment is still C-end consumption and localized wallet services, relying on WeChat’s strong social ecological capabilities and “Chinese outbound travel and enterprise overseas fever”, gradually transmitted from the C-end to the wallets of local merchants and B-end enterprise services.
1) C-end scene transportation: Hong Kong Metro “peer code” (one mobile phone swipes 3 people), South Korea’s Busan subway scans the code to ride, and Eurostar high-speed rail ticket purchase. Retail consumption: 15,000 convenience stores in Lawson in Japan, and Big C supermarkets in Thailand (self-pickup by appointment + tax refund). Cross-border tax refund: covering more than 600 tax refund points in 28 countries, with a peak tax refund amount of 50 million yuan in a single day and a arrival time of 3 minutes.
2) Localized wallet Southeast Asia launched WeChat Pay MY (Malaysia) and WeChat Pay TH (Thailand), with 5.8 million and 2 million users respectively, and cooperated with Grab and Gojek to achieve e-wallet mutual scanning.
3) B-end enterprise service Zhihui Goose: Provide cross-border e-commerce acquiring, multi-currency settlement (25 currencies), VAT tax declaration, and serve platforms such as SHEIN (average daily fund processing of more than 200 million yuan), Temu and other platforms. Cross-border remittance: Cooperate with Xoom, a subsidiary of PayPal, to support users in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom to send money to WeChat change, reducing handling fees by 30%.
2.2. WeChat internationalization strategy
WeChat can have such good expansion results of global countries and merchants, what internationalization strategy does it adopt? Let’s see it from the analysis of the actual official information.
2.2.1. Analyze the access mode from WeChat
WeChat’s global payment is developing so fast, which can be seen from the three access modes officially announced by WeChat. Although WeChat has three access modes, it mainly promotes the “institutional model” with the greatest profit.
Figure 8: Three access modes of WeChat 1) Direct connection mode (Hong Kong/UK only)
Merchants are directly connected to WeChat’s cross-border payment interface, and WeChat directly provides merchants with cross-border fund settlement services. Currently, this model is only available in Hong Kong and the UK. Therefore, most overseas merchants cannot directly access WeChat.
2) Institutional model (all regions)
Through the overseas local acquirer to access the WeChat Pay payment interface, WeChat Pay settles the funds for the acquirer, and the acquirer settles the funds to the merchant. At present, all overseas regions supported by WeChat support this model, and it is also the main way of WeChat’s business development.
3) Universal service provider model (Hong Kong only)
The payment interface of WeChat Pay is re-packaged by overseas local technical service providers to provide payment services for merchants. The service provider here only does technical docking, and the funds are directly settled by WeChat to the merchant, and the service provider does not involve capital flow.
2.2.2. WeChat overseas licensing analysis
There is not much news about WeChat’s overseas license layout, and there are public reports.
1) Hong Kong: Obtained Hong Kong’s stored value license (SVF) in 2016, supporting offline consumption in Hong Kong dollars, covering local scanning code payment and offline scenarios.
2) Southeast Asia: Launched local wallets “WeChat Pay MY/TH/ID” in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and other regions respectively
3) Eurozone: Obtained an EMI (Electronic Money Institution) license in Europe in 2020, covering 19 countries in the Eurozone.
In contrast, in most other countries, WeChat Pay does not directly hold a license, but expands its local business by partnering with more than 1,000 overseas institutions.
2.2.3. Social ecology + key markets + partners
Therefore, to sum up, WeChat’s globalization strategy is three:
1) Social ecological traffic
WeChat holds the traffic entrance of ecological users of 1.3 billion C-end users, and leverages overseas merchants and enterprises who want to do Chinese business overseas with Chinese outbound travel and enterprise going overseas as the main service scenarios.
2) Deep cultivation of key markets
The second feature of WeChat is to deeply cultivate key markets, focusing on licensing business in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore in Southeast Asia, and launching localized payment products and wallet products.
3) Partner expansion
The third feature is to quickly expand Chinese payment application scenarios and merchants in the local area through local acquirers and service providers, rather than falling into the quagmire of customized needs of directly connected merchants and service providers.
The better ones are developed countries in East Asia such as South Korea and Japan.
03 Globalization around “Chinese going overseas”
Through the analysis of this article, it is not difficult to find out. The strategic positioning of WeChat Global Pay is to expand global business around Chinese going overseas. This kind of focus makes people feel that WeChat is very mysterious and forbearing, but there are always genius strokes that you should not underestimate.
Let’s compare WeChat with its old rival Alipay (referring to Ant International’s subsidiary, Alipay+, Antom).
3.1. Comparison of product systems
WeChat’s strategic goal is also very clear to serve Chinese overseas consumption, WeChat products are mainly C-end Chinese and Chinese, although the product is relatively simple, but the scene is richer than Alipay. It’s just that local foreigners basically don’t use it.
It also serves Chinese tourists and Chinese, while Alipay products are much richer, in addition to basic code scanning and acquiring products, it has also invested in a large number of local wallets, Alipay+ and alliance chain wallets. Therefore, localization is better done, and there is a certain market share used by locals.
3.2. Mysterious transaction scale
This time, it is very regrettable that we did not find a more official overseas transaction scale between WeChat and Alipay, which may be inconvenient to announce trade secrets. However, from the perspective of users, expanded merchants and countries and regions, the transaction scale of Alipay should be larger than that of WeChat.
3.3. “Building a hard village” is a good strategy
WeChat has “1.3 billion high-frequency C-end users”, and there is really no need to risk to fight for the richness of the product line, and through the cooperation of local institutions and merchants, there is a steady stream of traffic to provide rich scenarios.
Through the unique model of “social + payment”, with the heating up of Chinese scenes and enterprises going overseas, continue to expand overseas B2C and B2B scenarios, and continuously improve their international competitiveness through technological innovation and cooperation and openness.
Finally, share a competitive analysis table with everyone, which is also a family word, all as a reference.
