PayPal is looking to launch a local digital wallet in China with a focus on cross-border payment services in an attempt to fend off fierce competition from bigger rivals such as Alipay and WeChat Pay, which collectively dominate China’s domestic mobile payment market.

Hannah Qiu, the China CEO of PayPal, made the remarks during a recent panel session hosted by CNBC at the Boao Forum for Asia in the southern Chinese island province of Hainan.

“Our future business is mainly in cross-border transactions. Our value is more from overseas. In our overseas market, there are over 377 million individual users and over 20 million corporate users” Qiu said at the panel session, according to CNBC.

The executive also tried to downplay PayPal’s direct competition with China’s local players. Instead, she said that PayPal has “a lot of cooperation” with them, without providing names or further details.

However, PayPal’s plan to concentrate on cross border payments might not help it avoid direct competition with China’s fintech giants.

Given the long term trend of Chinese people increasingly traveling abroad, pandemic-aside, Alipay and WeChat Pay have both focused more on cross-border payments with plans to increase the number of connections between their services and overseas merchants. Last year WeChat Pay launched a new service allowing Chinese students studying at certain South Korean universities to pay tuition fees through its platform.

In January, PayPal became the first foreign company to provide digital payment services in China by taking full control of the indigenous electronic payment firm Gopay.

Contact reporter Ding Yi (yiding@caixin.com)

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