Why Tencent Lags Alipay In Cross-Border Payments

In the mid-2010s, the fintech business of Tencent grew exponentially, with WeChat Pay and its offshoots allowing the company to become a viable competitor to Alipay in China. Yet even as Tencent captured close to half of China’s payments market, and established a digital bank, WeBank, that could rival Ant Group’s MYbank, it never displayed the same kind of appetite for global expansion as Jack Ma’s company.

The reason for Tencent’s greater caution overseas is multifold. On the one hand, its CEO Pony Ma is a different personality than Jack Ma, and did not – at least not that we are aware of – display the same kind of ambition to build a regional payments ecosystem in Southeast Asia as the Alibaba founder. Second, Tencent’s core business is gaming rather than e-commerce, and the synergies between gaming and fintech are not as significant as online commerce and digital financial services.