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In China, Mobile Payments is a Young Person’s Game

Posted by: Caring
Category: Blog

Sometimes, some things are just a young person’s racket. Extreme sports. Competitive eating. Many kinds of popular music.

In China, however, there’s one thing that’s surprisingly popular with young people and mainly young people alone: mobile payments.

Reports suggest that users aged 21 to 29 represent just over 40 percent of all mobile payment users in the country, and when users in their 30s are added, that’s most of the mobile payment base altogether.

Said youngsters routinely turn to mobile payments to pay bills, conduct mobile commerce transactions, and conduct online-to-offline (O2O) business.

In fact, mobile payment users that don’t fit in the 21-39 block make up just 21 percent of the total, and the second-largest loose percentage is the 16-20 year old bracket at seven percent.

Interestingly, there are plenty of 40-49 year olds involved at 12 percent, though the elders make up just two percent. The study stops calculating after age 59, so it’s not immediately clear if the over 60 crowds in China don’t use mobile payments or simply wasn’t consulted.

Alipay and WeChat Pay proved to be the top of this particular heap, though each was used for different reasons.

Alipay proved popular for several reasons, including bill payment, wealth management systems, online-to-offline use, and offline use, beating WeChat Pay on every front.

However, WeChat Pay proved more readily used for peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers, mainly because WeChat Pay is directly connected to WeChat, a social messaging system.

With this knowledge in mind, there are several possibilities for competitors here. One, competitors could try to groom the next generation into a certain mobile payments platform, a concept that could work out well as many 16 to 20-year-olds don’t have a much disposable income to begin with, but likely will as they become the eventual dominant generation.

Competitors could go the other way, and push a really easy-to-use system for the older market. That may or may not work so well as it might not be ease of use that’s keeping the elders out. Or, they could try to be one more in a growing field pursuing the biggest bloc of the market around.

The mobile payment market is a strange field as is, and with so many young folks dominating the market in China, we may see some unusual developments extend from this demographic oddity as a result.

 

Author: Caring