
Photo: VCG
Digital payments continued to grow in China in the last quarter of 2019, while mobile payments grew even faster.
For the three months through December, the country’s banks processed 62.1 billion electronic payments, representing a total of 654.9 trillion yuan ($93.45 trillion), according to statistics released Tuesday by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank. The transaction value was up 6.3% from the same period of 2018.
Of those payments, 30.7 billion were mobile transactions, representing a year-on-year increase of 73.6%. A total of 94.9 trillion yuan changed hands via mobile devices, up 21.3% from the same period last year
Overall, 95.9 billion non-cash transactions were processed by the country’s banks during the period, representing 969.6 trillion yuan, the central bank said.
Meanwhile, non-bank entities processed 202.5 billion online transactions in the quarter, representing a total of 68.6 trillion yuan. Those figures jumped 28.3% and 21.1%, respectively, from a year ago.
The number of people using mobile payments in China is expected to reach 790 million in 2020, with facial recognition payments on track to be adopted more widely across the country, according to a report by iiMedia Research. The country’s two most widely used mobile payment services, Alipay and WeChat Pay, are currently both touting their respective payment machines that allow customers to make payments by simply scanning their faces.
Contact reporter Ding Yi (yiding@caixin.com)
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