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Tencent's WeChat, China's most popular social media app, has launched its digital payments platform in Malaysia, its first market in Asia beyond China and Hong Kong. Malaysia's WeChat users will be able to transfer money among themselves and make payments to offline merchants in ringgit. This suggests Tencent is building a local payments service, rather than taking the more common route of overseas expansion used by Chinese mobile-app providers that caters to Chinese tourists or nationals living abroad. Malaysia's central bank has been implementing policies promoting electronic payments in a bid to boost a network that lags behind other south-east Asian markets. That has triggered the launch of digital wallets by other strong players, including Grab, the south-east Asia ride-hailing company. "Malaysia is a vibrant market. Technology-savvy Malaysians are embracing a digital lifestyle and to meet this shift, the payment experience has to evolve. Bringing WeChat Pay to Malaysia is our response to this," said WeChat Pay Malaysia. SY Lau, senior vice-president at Tencent, told Reuters in November when the company acquired a Malaysian epayment licence, that WeChat had 20 million users in the country, equivalent to almost two-thirds of the population. The potential for mobile payments is vast in Malaysia, where cash is still king but the number of mobile phones, mostly smartphones, outstrips a population of 32.1 million by more than 10 million, according to the central bank. But collaborations with local banks, of which WeChat has none, will be just as important for WeChat Pay to flourish there. At home, it took Tencent and Ant Financial, Alibaba's electronic payments affiliate, years to build the links with hundreds of Chinese banks that make their services possible. |