Is Chinese Game Company Giant Interactive Launching Its Own Payment Service?

Geez, everybody’s getting into China’s online finance market these days. Following in the footsteps of Sina, the most recent internet company to take the plunge, and the fast growth of Alibaba’s Yuebao, it looks as though game developer and operator Giant Interactive will also be entering the e-payments market. According to the Beijing Business News, the company has just filed a trademark for Quanebao, a term, based on its meaning and its similarity to the names of other platforms, almost certainly refers to an online payment or banking system.

The word on the street is that Quanebao is going to be something innovative compared to similar platforms, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that given the company developing it, it’s going to be games related. My own money would be on a system that makes payment simple and easy in-game across a variety of online games, but at this point everything beyond the actual term the company trademarked is just speculation, so I could be very wrong. When speaking to the Beijing Business News, a Giant spokesman apparently did not deny the rumors that the company would launch a service called Quanebao, but avoided saying it was a financial service.

China’s online finance and e-payments market is getting very crowded of late, thanks in part to new permits the government issued earlier this year that have allowed a host of new companies to get in on the game. But I’m inclined to suspect that some substantial herd-thinning is coming; at the end of the day users aren’t likely going to want more than one or two different platforms to bother with, and that means every internet and gaming company having its own payment system isn’t going to work. But could Giant’s coming platform be one of the few that makes the cut? We’ll have to see what it looks like before anyone can make an educated guess.

(Beijing Business News via TechWeb)