China

insights  ·  11 min read

The Lesson from China Is Not the Digital Wallet. It Is the Merchant Ecosystem.

China is often treated as proof that the future of payments belongs to the digital wallet. That reading is too shallow. Alipay and WeChat Pay became powerful because payment sat inside broader systems of commerce, communication, customer discovery and financial services. The wallet reduced friction at checkout. The ecosystem made the relationship valuable before and after it. For payment providers elsewhere the opportunity is not to reproduce a Chinese super-app. It is to understand how payment can become the connective tissue of a merchant ecosystem.