Payworks is bringing Chinese payment service AliPay to the European point-of-sale.
The POS payment gateway provider has partnered with Ant Financial in order to integrate the AliPay service with European acquirers, the companies announced today. This marks an expansion for AliPay in Europe. It first arrived on the continent in 2015.
With the partnership, AliPay will gain access to the POS for dozens of European merchants and retailers. Moreover, those retailers get access to AliPay, which, with its 400 million users, is less of a payment app and more of a lifestyle, said Payworks CEO Christian Deger.
“”The reason people are using AliPay is not because they love scanning QR codes,” Deger told Bank Innovation. “It’s because they are used to living their entire lives in the AliPay app.”
This partnership will allow AliPay to have more of a global reach, said Deger, as it allows developers to integrate the ability for an application to accept AliPay via a single API created by Payworks. Previously, while AliPay had an API of its own, it was “very difficult” for developers outside China to integrate with, said Deger.
Payworks currently operates globally, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and of course, Europe, where its partnership with AliPay will initially be focused. The company is looking to expand that partnership globally in the future, said Deger.
“What’s really exciting is that we used to have card payments at the POS, now we are seeing the same development we saw in ecommerce,” said Deger, “Services like AliPay, WeChat Pay are really becoming more important,” said Deger.
Payworks is “not officially” partnered with Tencent or Wechat currently, according to Deger, but the company is focusing on making sure its clients have the ability to support this “next-gen” technology, which may not specifically mean mobile payments at the point-of-sale.
“There are a lot of examples of alternative payments at the POS that were made because the technology was there,” said Deger. “But those usually fail.”
Payworks will begin supporting the integration of AliPay today, according to the companies.