Around three-quarters of people in China use online payment services

The rapid development of online payment services has brought tremendous change to the lives of ordinary people in China. More than 76 percent of adults made a total of 160 billion domestic non-cash payments last year with a value of 3,759 trillion yuan (543 trillion U.S. dollars), according to a report published by the People's Bank of China in August.

The logos of Alipay and WeChat Pay. [File photo: IC]

Ten years ago, China's gross volume of e-commerce merchandise was less than 1 percent of the global total, but now that figure has risen to around 40 percent, surpassing the combined total for the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, and France, said Fan Jianping, the chief economist at China's National Information Center. Electronic payments are being used in China to pay for everything from online shopping, hospital bills, and daily expenses like water and electricity bills.

Electronic payments have also made inroads into China's relatively underdeveloped rural areas. Last year, 66.5 percent of rural residents were using mobile payment apps, and made around 9.1 billion payments. Zhang Youquan, a sheep farmer in Inner Mongolia, provides an example of how electronic payments have changed the lives of people in rural areas. Using a payment app, he was able to access a 300,000 yuan loan that arrived in his account on the day he submitted the application.

And recently, China's mobile payment apps have been expanding their reach into the global payments market. Tencent's Wechat Pay is now used in 20 countries, while Alipay offers payment services in almost 40 countries.