Tencent Holdings Ltd is looking to expand its wildly successful WeChat Pay service to Malaysia. The company has applied for a license to offer local payment services in the country, allowing users to transact in Ringgit on the platform.
WeChat Pay is yet another electronic payment service that allows users to pay for goods and services. It essentially works like Apple Pay or Samsung Pay; requiring the user to input a credit or debit card to get started.
Tencent’s platform does far more things in its homeland of China, where the service is also used to pay bills and transfer funds between people. It’s unknown how much of this integration will be present in Malaysia, but there should at least be the option for fund transfers present.
WeChat is one of the more popular instant messaging platforms in Malaysia, especially among the Chinese and Malay communities. The latter of which has managed to create an entirely new form of lingual shorthand known as “wicet”.
This expansion isn’t the only news coming from Tencent this week. The company has also announced a partnership with US startup Stripe to allow merchants around the world to accept payments from WeChat. Essentially taking WeChat Pay’s reach to the global scale and allowing it to directly compete with other platforms.
It’s not difficult to see why WeChat is confident about expanding its payment services. Users of the platform are already used to spending money on it, since Tencent’s WeChat profit largely comes from value added services.
[Source: Reuters]
