PayPal announces plan to launch local wallet in China

American fintech company PayPal has announced its plan to launch a local wallet in China.

This comes after the company became the first foreign firm with 100% ownership of a payments platform in China in January.The fintech giant’s centre of interest is believed to be cross-border payments, as opposed to competing Alipay and WeChat Pay who focus on domestic payments.

Hannah Qiu, the China CEO for PayPal said their future business is mainly on 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, we have a large network of such users. Thus, what we need to do is to build a bridge, bringing good Chinese products overseas and taking good overseas products back to China,” said Qiu.

“We don’t have direct competition with local payment companies. Instead, we have a lot of cooperation with them. I’m not listing the companies’ names, but we have very deep cooperation with some local companies.”

The two leading companies within China’s domestic mobile payments market, namely WeChat and Alipay with a billion users between the two of them, allow users to pay online or in stores. At physical stores, users show a barcode that the merchant scans to take a payment.

Last year, PayPal Holdings Inc joined the cryptocurrency market which is allowing customers to buy, sell and hold bitcoin and other virtual coins using the U.S. digital payments company’s online wallets.