CCTV-NEWS：赵克锋：THE DIGITAL INFLUENCE

发布者：admin发布时间：2016-10-31浏览次数：500

Q: How the emergence of new technologies in online payment has affected consumer behavior in China?

There bound to more and more application layer level invention such as VR payment coming to the market because the underlying infrastructure level online payment technologies are already top-notch and saturating in China.

The Chinese online payment market is about RMB 6000 billion the first quarter this year and it is expanding into other countries. For example, Alibaba has just entered the US market as the Chinese customers are expected to spend $40 billion in the US next year.

The payment market grew on average for about 20% each quarter last year but slowed dramatically to 5% in quarter 1. The growth since quarter 2 last year is mainly due to the red pocket war during the Chinese New Year between Alibaba and Tencent.

The war had already enticed almost every active Chinese user to create a payment account. This partly explains the drop of market growth from the 20 % level to 5% in Q1. Another factor is the tightening of the Fintech industries starting end of last year.

To further answer the question, we shouldn't omit reverse causality, especially more broadly on how regulators affect not just the emergence but the adoption of new technologies.

Consider the tension between the bankers and Alibaba's Yu'ebao. The bankers complained because the profit rate of banks are sometimes as low as 1 percent. So economies of scale matters. And the banks need to maintain a lot of branches and ATM machines but if users could use Alibaba's Yuebao service to transfer the money online without any restriction then it is susceptible of free-riding. Then there was a new policy and the dramatical growth of Yu'ebao stopped.

In that sense, recent roller-coaster swings in the market growth of mobile payment are not really from new technologies alone but an interaction of government policies, both local and abroad.