Alipay Express to Go Global This Month, Time for Paypal to Tremble

Obviously not the official logo...

We’ve heard from sources in the industry that Alibaba is indeed ready to roll out its online payment platform internationally – in fact, it’ll come as soon as within two or three weeks, and it’ll almost certainly be called Alipay Express. It looks set to be hugely disruptive – especially to Paypal – as it brings the world’s largest such service to a global user-ship for the first time.

According to the same source that’s familiar with the matter, one major, recognisable brand of bank is onboard with Alipay Express already, and will be the one to launch it later this month.

Recently we saw rumors in the Chinese media to this effect, but now for the first time we have a solid name and timeframe. Alibaba, when contacted by PO, had no comment on this issue, but would not deny the whole notion either.

Alipay Express looks to be based very closely on the Chinese Alipay ‘Quickpay’ service, which is a fairly recent branch of Alibaba’s payment platform that launched at the end of last year. That ties a credit card to a user’s conventional Alipay account, and has so far garnered 30 million credit card-carrying users and has been rolled out by 100 Chinese banks. Alipay’s Quickpay is used not only on the company’s own B2C or C2C sites – Tmall and Taobao, respectively – but across the vast majority of sites that take online payments in China.

It all seems familiar from the model of Ebay’s (NASQAQ:EBAY) Paypal, which has the most to lose from Alipay Express going global.