When Cherry Huang joined Alipay in 2016, she asked her boss what her revenue KPI was. She was told the only target was number of users. “Jack Ma believes if you have users, then you can succeed,” she said.
Speaking at the STB Marketing Conference last week, Huang, who was appointed general manager of cross-border business for South and Southeast Asia of Alipay in December 2016, made it clear that it was not the intention of Ant Financial Services to build Alipay into a global consumer brand.
Cherry Huang: “Alipay is a Chinese brand for Chinese consumers.”
“Alipay is a Chinese brand for Chinese consumers,” she said.
For its expansion into global markets, it has invested in and forged local partnerships such as with Paytm in India, Globe in Philippines and Elang Mahkota Teknologi.of Indonesia. “As we expand, we want to help others become successful, not grow our own brand,” she said.
She also made it clear that Alipay is not “a fintech, but techfin”, a subtle difference in that it is about deploying technology in the financial service industry.
She also said she does not see Alipay competiting with Apple Pay. “Apple Pay is smart payment, Alipay is smart lifestyle.”
Through Alipay, she said, its users can pay loans, search 1m restaurants in 38 countries, purchase insurance. This is in line with Ant Financial Services’ mission to “leverage Alibaba’s online marketplace success to benefit brick-and-mortar merchants, and to expand Alipay into the world’s leading payments platform and lifestyle ecosystem in South and Southeast Asia.”
The name “Ant” was also chosen to symbolize Alibaba’s mission of building “an open platform to facilitate small and medium sized businesses around the world”.
“Ants are small but when you put lots of them together, they can move mountains,” she said, adding that today Alibaba is the world’s largest B2B platform connecting 100 million wholesalers in 200 countries, and Alipay the world’s largest online payment company, expanding into places like Santa Village in Lapland, for example. (See video at bottom)
Tourist to Santa’s Village in Lapland using Alipay to pay for purchases.
Building trust has been the cornerstone of growth, said Huang. Asked later how Alibaba had managed to build trust as a Chinese brand “when traditionally Chinese brands have trust deficits”, Huang quoted Jack Ma as saying, “If I have one customer complaint, we will change things. To gain trust, you have to do this.”
The 11.11 sale, which has become a global shopping festival, started as an experiment to test its technology. “It wasn’t a money making exercise.”
This year, the festival resulted in RM168 billion (US$26m) of transactions in 200 countries in one day. At its peak, it was handling 256,000 transactions a second. “It shows the capability of the tech,” said Huang.
Relating her own experience of trying to open a bank account in Singapore, she said Citibank told her she needed $50,000 minimum whereas “for 20 Singapore cents (one RMB), you can open an account with Alipay”.
She said that acceptance of Alipay in Singapore was increasing. About 16,000 Comfort taxis now accept Alipay and luxury brands like Louis Vuitton have come round to the reach of the brand.
Of its 200m users, 93% are under 35 and 67% do not have a credit card.
It has also launched a carbon emissions programme whereby Alipay will plant a tree “with your serial number”.
And as it expands across the world, Huang said, its mission in 2018 remains to “build on trust, to serve customers and to provide a trustworthy credit system for small and medium entreprises”.
Its most powerful asset of course is data. Huang spoke of its ability to track people real-time through a “heat map” so that “we know if they are staying for 30 days, then they are long-term residents, and we know where they shop. This means we can match the right merchant with the right customer.”
• Featured image (Santa Claus Village in Lapland) credit: RomanBabakin/iStock-GettyImages