How China Leapfrogged the U.S. in Mobile Payments

Turn the clock back a few years and everyone was talking about how “backwards” Asia was when it came to digital payments. E-commerce was booming in the rest of the world, thanks to the prevalence of credit cards and other online payment options. But that wasn’t the case in Asia—and especially not in China, the world’s biggest Internet market—because credit cards weren’t widely adopted.

Fast-forward to today and China and other Asian countries have leapfrogged the U.S. in one of the fastest growing areas of payments—mobile. Alipay (Alibaba) and Tenpay (Tencent) together boast hundreds of millions of users. U.S. companies are racing to catch up. (See related story about PayPal).