In The Valley Village, this shopping centre near Disneyland Paris, very popular with chinese tourists and specialized in the destocking of luxury brands, more than half of the points of sale accept their cash payments by mobile without contact with the application Alipay. This is also the case of the large Printemps department store, shops of Aéroports de Paris or, more recently, the Galeries Lafayette.
For the past eighteen months, Alipay, the solution of the chinese giant e-commerce Alibaba, to pay with his smartphone, which is very popular in China with its 600 million users, is expanding in France. For Ant Financial, the financial group manager of the application Alipay, it is to accompany the approximately two million Chinese who visit every year to the Hexagon. After beginning to not felted, the establishment intends to “move to an industrial development, with the goal that tens of thousands of French traders accept Alipay within a year,” says Jean-Cyrille Girardin, director of strategic partnerships in Europe in Alipay.
Partnerships
The specific technology used by the e-wallets in China (the merchant has to scan with his payment terminal with a bar code “QR Code” that is generated by the application, or issue a QR Code) represents a brake to the rapid adoption of Alipay in France. But the chinese group was established in 2018 a number of partnerships with manufacturers of payment terminals, in particular with Ingenico, to remove this obstacle and adapt the equipment used during checkout.
“The objective now is to expand the number of banks with which we work to reach more signs, because these are the banks that sell Alipay to their merchant customers, explains Mr. Girardin. It must be lucid, a small shop will not open an account in another bank to be able to…
