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Xiaomi announces its China-only answer for Android Pay
Xiaomi and China UnionPay have joined together to launch Mi Pay in China, a brand new way to pay via Xiaomi smartphones.
Samsung Pay joins China's trillion dollar mobile wallet market
With Apple already expecting China to be its biggest mobile payment market, it's no surprise that its biggest direct competitor, Samsung, also wants a slice of this piping hot pie. After a one-month public beta, today the Korean giant is officially launching its Samsung Pay service in China in partnership with UnionPay -- inevitably the same bankcard company that helped launch Apple Pay locally. In other words, only UnionPay credit and debit cards -- up to 10 of them per device -- can be associated with local Samsung phones for the time being.
Apple Pay comes to China in early 2016
As rumored (and inevitably), Apple Pay is coming to China. The company has partnered-up with Chinese bankcard network UnionPay to launch its payment system. The network, which is as ubiquitous as Visa in China, to let iPhone users pair their bank details to their Apple hardware. It arrives with support from "15 of China's leading banks." Like other territories, card numbers aren't stored on devices or Apple's servers and it'll launch in China with support for the Apple Watch right from the start, if it's wrist payments you're waiting, nay aching, for. The country's regulators still have to approve the announcement, but Apple's press release points to a launch in early 2016 -- just in time for Chinese New Year.
China UnionPay and Intel join forces for secure mobile payment
At IDF's second-day keynote in Beijing today, Intel announced its collaboration with bank card giant China UnionPay for secure mobile payment, with the latter utilizing Intel's Identity Protection Technology and also its distribution of the Hadoop software framework for datacenters. With UnionPay being China's top bank card organization boasting a total of 3.5 billion cards to date, this is obviously a big deal for Intel both locally and around the world -- at least in the 141 countries and regions where UnionPay is accepted, according to Executive Vice President Chai Hongfeng. Chai also used his stage time to show off UnionPay Quick Pass, China's very own NFC payment service with over 1.1 million local POS terminals as of December 2012. The exec used none other than Intel's developer device to buy its Corporate Vice President Doug Fisher a can of "Mountain Doug" (we would've preferred "Chai Tea" instead), but of course, HTC beat Intel to it with the joint launch of mobile Quick Pass back in August 2011. Anyhow, there's a press release after the break.
Square gets a few more Chinese clones, Jack Dorsey may or may not be flattered
Never mind what PayPal has just unveiled today -- look at these mobile phone credit card readers from China instead. If you ask Square CEO Jack Dorsey, we're sure he'll have to a thing or two to say about these familiar-looking dongles (and not to mention the various weibo microblogging services that were inspired by Jack's Twitter platform). Coincidentally, all three of these pictures above showed up on Sina Weibo earlier today, albeit from different accounts with very little detail in each post -- we'd like to think they're trying to make a point one after the other. So who's behind these little plastic bricks from the Far East?Starting from the left (courtesy of Xiaomi Vice President Li Wanqiang) we have Lakala, a well-known Chinese payment service provider whose POS terminals are featured in major supermarkets and convenience stores. We spoke to the company's CEO Sun Taoran who assured us that this is a booming business in China, as credit cards are more popular than you'd expect these days (most large eateries, supermarkets and even karaoke bars in domestic cities will happily accept them); and of course, he'd certainly want a slice of that massive smartphone pie over there. The Beijing-based company also said its dongle will function even without a phone client installed, but it wouldn't further elaborate at this point. Expect to see Lakala's product launch in May.
HTC and China's UnionPay ink deal for NFC-enabled mobile payment system, new handset
Fun news for the swipe-to-pay set: HTC has signed on to produce an NFC-enabled phone -- this would be its first -- in China this September. The deal will see China's UnionPay Co. start accepting mobile payments using this HTC device through its 400,000-strong network of POS terminals. A UnionPay rep. on-hand suggested that that number will likely expand to 700,000 by year's end, and good thing too if you consider the country has some 2.6 billion credit and debit cards in circulation worldwide. Unfortunately, there was little mention of HTC's new device, though the pictures seem to suggest that the current prototype used in the demo was a revved up version of its Incredible S smartphone -- tentatively referred to as the HTC "Stunning." The jury's still out on the this whole mobile payment thing, but we're firm believers that if it is safe and convenient, everybody's gonna buy in.
