Jack Ma paves the way for Alipay to enter the Vietnamese market

Alipay, the online payment platform of Alibaba Group, has just officially signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the National Payment Corporation of Vietnam (NAPAS).

Cooperation between the two sides was promoted on the occasion of billionaire Jack Ma, Chairman of Alibaba, visiting Vietnam.

National Payment Corporation of Vietnam (NAPAS) is the only payment intermediary licensed by the State Bank to provide financial switching services and electronic clearing services for retail transactions in Vietnam, acting as a gateway to international payment organizations and Asian payment networks.

Currently, NAPAS is managing and operating a switching system connecting more than 17,300 ATMs and 270,600 POS machines, serving more than 100 million cardholders of 43 domestic and international commercial banks operating in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, Alipay is an intermediary channel for payment, providing guarantee services, similar to credit cards, debit cards or bank accounts and currently has more than 520 million active users, mainly in China. The Vietnamese market is one of Alipay's next target markets in its global business strategy.

Through the cooperation between NAPAS, banks and Alipay, merchants will be provided with a new, convenient payment method to meet the needs of Chinese tourists who spend and shop using the Alipay payment application - similar to credit cards, debit cards or bank accounts - when coming to Vietnam.

According to statistics from the General Department of Tourism, in the first quarter of 2017, Chinese tourists increased by 64% compared to the same period in 2016, reaching nearly 950,000 arrivals, accounting for 30% of the total number of international tourists to Vietnam.

Ms. Nguyen Tu Anh, Chairwoman of the Board of Directors of NAPAS, said: “Organizing the connection and providing payment services through the financial switching and electronic clearing portal of NAPAS helps to bring the payment flow of cross-border transactions through the system of banks and payment institutions in Vietnam”.

Recently, NAPAS, together with Samsung and six commercial banks, has provided the market with the Samsung Pay mobile payment application based on NAPAS's financial switching infrastructure and digital payment infrastructure for domestic ATM card products of banks in Vietnam.

According to Ho Chi Minh City Law Newspaper