New progress has been made in the interconnectivity of online payment scenarios. On September 4th, Taobao and Tmall announced that in order to enhance consumers' shopping experience, Taobao plans to add WeChat payment capabilities and adjust platform rules after the collection of opinions is completed. It is reported that this adjustment will cover all Taobao and Tmall merchants. WeChat Pay responded to this by stating that the feature adaptation with Taobao platform merchants is currently being launched. Please refer to the Taobao platform announcement for the specific launch time.
Wang Pengbo, a financial industry analyst at Broadcom, pointed out that WeChat Pay has become a payment service provider for Taobao, which can be seen as a model of multi-party win-win. With the deepening of cross cooperation between consumption scenarios on different Internet platforms and different payment instruments, it is not only conducive to improving the payment convenience of the general public, but also conducive to boosting consumption potential, which is in line with the original intention of the regulatory requirements of connectivity.
Taobao plans to add WeChat payment capability
The interconnection between Taobao and WeChat in the payment field began with UnionPay Cloud QuickPass. At the end of September 2021, WeChat payment and Alipay have successively announced that they are interconnected with UnionPay cloud flash payment, that is, the cloud flash payment app can support some application recharge services of Tencent, and WeChat applet gradually supports cloud flash payment; Alipay also opened online scenes to cloud flash payment, covering 85% of Taobao merchants in the first batch, and realizing the scanning payment function of WeChat collection code, Alipay collection code, cloud flash payment app, and bank and institutional apps.
In January of this year, Taobao and UnionPay Cloud QuickPass had a deep cooperation and launched the Cloud QuickPass online payment platform, supporting multiple bank apps to accept payments on the Taobao platform. Recently, Taobao and Tmall announced that in order to enhance consumers' shopping experience, Taobao plans to add WeChat payment capabilities and adjust platform rules after this opinion collection is completed. This also means that the interconnection of online payments in China has entered a "deep water zone".
Previously, there was no "direct payment" between Alipay and WeChat payment, which caused some consumers some payment problems. In response, relevant departments have also actively introduced measures to improve the regulations and procedures for the interconnection of QR code payments.
In August 2019, the People's Bank of China released the "FinTech Development Plan (2019-2021)", which stated that it would promote the interconnection of barcode payments, research and formulate technical standards for barcode payment interconnection, unify barcode payment coding rules, build a barcode payment interconnection technology system, break down barriers to barcode payment services, and achieve mutual recognition and scanning of barcode identifiers among different apps and merchants.
With the continuous promotion of barcode payment interconnection by the central bank, the barriers to barcode payment services have been further broken down, achieving "mutual recognition and scanning" of barcode identifiers for different apps and merchants. The reporter learned that there are currently no technical barriers to the exchange and interoperability of QR code payments. Users no longer need to wait for complex payment interface jumps and additional operations to complete convenient online QR code payments.
Online payment interconnection has entered a 'deep water zone', and how to protect user data privacy has received attention
Today, the interconnection of online payment has entered the "deep water area". How to protect user data privacy and prevent payment risk accidents is becoming a more concerned issue for major Internet platforms and payment institutions. The so-called prevention of payment risk accidents mainly refers to avoiding errors in the verification and clearing process of payment information by different payment systems, which may lead to errors in user payment amounts or unsuccessful user payments.
An insider pointed out that at present, large-scale Internet platforms have established sound countermeasures in terms of user data privacy protection, prevention of payment risk accidents, etc. Once Taobao, Tmall, and WeChat Pay can negotiate the settlement rules for acquiring payments and complete internal testing, Taobao can quickly integrate with WeChat Pay.
It is worth noting that whether WeChat payment methods such as facial recognition payment and palm print payment can be quickly introduced into the consumption scene of Taobao and Tmall is also highly concerned by the industry. On the one hand, this requires the Internet platform to support new payment methods such as face brushing and palmprint payment; On the other hand, it is necessary to establish a more comprehensive mechanism for protecting users' personal information.
At present, when many large Internet platforms around the world introduce a variety of third-party payment tools, they have adopted high access thresholds in terms of privacy protection and personal information security of users' personal information, to avoid the latter from illegally obtaining users' personal information in the payment and clearing process. Therefore, it cannot be ruled out that when introducing new WeChat payment methods such as facial recognition and palm print payment, both parties will use trusted AI or privacy computing technologies to achieve user identification and authentication in the payment process while ensuring personal information privacy and security.
The reporter learned that because a large number of Taobao Tmall users have Alipay and WeChat payment at the same time, it provides high "convenience" for user authentication and accurate identification of both parties in payment operations such as face brushing payment and palm print. In the future, with the growing popularity of face brushing payment and palmprint payment, Internet institutions will certainly pay more attention to personal information security protection in the process of payment interconnection to ensure the steady progress of payment interconnection business.