WeChat Pay hopes to expand business in Macau

Grace Yin

WeChat Pay hopes to extend its range of operations in Macau, according to Grace Yin, operations director of WeChat Pay’s International Business division, who spoke to the Times yesterday during an interview.

“This year, we hope to enhance operations in Macau, and to achieve a rather high level of permeability in any specific business,” Yin told the Times yesterday on the sidelines of a press conference about the WeChat overseas payment service.

According to Yin, more than 10,000 businesses in Macau have already installed WeChat Pay, with “the majority of business from the retail industry, including big business, places where tourists frequently go, and the ferry terminals.”

“I think that mainstream [businesses] are all using WeChat Pay,” said Yin.

When asked about the amounts that have been transacted between businesses and tourists through WeChat Pay in Macau, Yin said that “temporarily, we do not have statistics that can be published, but we will report to the public once we have them.”

In Yin’s report, the development of WeChat Pay in Macau is still in a relatively early stage, although current developments are approaching a mature status.

The company is said to be connecting more Macau businesses to WeChat Pay as well as teaching business operators how to use more of the service’s functions.

The director of WeChat Pay’s international business operations pointed out that her company wishes to communicate with Macau’s local e-payment operators, in addition to help them operate and develop their own applications, “because they [the local ones] know more about the needs of Macau locals. We still hope that, in the short term, Macau’s local [e-payment applications] can become the ones providing services to Macau’s local users.”

During an event organized at the Macau Tower, yesterday, WeChat reported that one of the WeChat Pay applications is helping to connect tourists with taxi drivers and vice versa.

The WeChat Pay function, which launched approximately one month ago, has 3,300 registered users and 130 registered taxi drivers.

Nowadays, a growing number of Chinese tourists is traveling abroad.

When talking to the Times about WeChat Pay’s future expansion overseas, Grace informed that “WeChat Pay is available in 25 countries and regions, and it is available in 13 mainstream currencies. In those regions and countries where Chinese tourists are mainly visitors, [we] can see WeChat Pay terminals. Australia and South West Asia are our main target markets.”

“This year, we will have [additional operations] in the western market,” announced Yin, adding that her company will study a business expansion to occur after June of this year.