Hong Leong Bank today has announced that Bank Negara Malaysia has approved its application to partner with Tencent’s subsidiary, Tenpay Payment Technology in order to offer WeChat Pay payment solutions in our market. The announcement comes just a week after Tencent revealed that it will be launching WeChat Pay in Malaysia next year.
According to HLB’s announcement, this partnership has enabled the bank to become the merchant acquirer for WeChat Pay in Malaysia. In other words, HLB is able to provide the necessary support for local merchants that are interested to utilize WeChat Pay as payment options for their businesses through an easy-to-adopt and fully integrated cross-border payment solution.
Given the popularity of WeChat Pay in China, it is not surprising that HLB is looking at Chinese tourists as the potential main group of users that would utilize the payment option through merchants in Malaysia. However, Tencent itself might have bigger objective as the company’s Senior Vice President, S.Y.Lau has stated in a recent interview that there are actually 20 million WeChat users in Malaysia.
He further added that our market has a good level of acceptance towards internet products from China. With that, the new partnership with HLB could likely be the first of many in order for Tencent to position WeChat Pay as a proper payment solution in Malaysia rather than simply being a mere option that is only useful for Chinese tourists.
