Trump to ban US transactions with Chinese apps including Alipay, WeChat Pay

The order cites concerns over national security as the reason behind the ban but does not give specific instances of data theft among the applications. US president-elect Joe Biden will eventually decide whether to enforce the order.

The ban hits Ant Group after the fintech giant’s US$35 billion IPO was halted by Chinese regulators in November. Last month, the company was asked by the People’s Bank of China to return to its payment services roots, while another Chinese watchdog, the State Administration for Market Regulation, also launched an antitrust probe into Ant’s parent company Alibaba Group. Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma hasn’t been seen in public since the suspension of Ant Group’s IPO.

The executive order will have an impact on Tencent’s QQ Wallet and WeChat Pay, CamScanner, SHAREit, VMate, and WPS Office. It’s reported that the Trump administration is considering adding Alibaba and Tencent – worth a combined US$1.3 trillion – to the blacklist.

Since WeChat and Alipay have relatively small customer bases in the US than in China, the immediate impact on them will probably be limited, according to the report.

In 2020, the document-scanning app CamScanner, with 4.4 million installs in the US, was the most downloaded one among those that are named in the order. WeChat and Alipay had 1.6 million and 207,000 downloads in the country, respectively.

“The ultimate scope of the restrictions and the entities that will be targeted is hard to predict. Presumably, the impact will be focused on transactions in the United States, although that is not guaranteed,” Nicholas Turner, a lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson in Hong Kong, told Bloomberg.