This excessively blue image of the press conference is brought to you by the Xiaomi M1's terrible auto white-balance feature!
Paying for things online in China is generally kind of a hassle, especially on a mobile phone. It has always required third party accounts and apps, and I have long wished you could just type in your bank card information and buy things without all that hassle. Now, thanks to UnionPay and UCWeb, you can! At a press conference today in Beijing, the two companies announced a partnership and a new mobile payment solution that allows UnionPay card holders to use their credit or debit cards to make purchases directly in the UCWeb mobile browser.
From the demo we saw at the press conference, it looks pretty slick. After a one-time installation of a security plugin, mobile UC Browser users just have to place their orders, choose the UnionPay option (without having to open up a separate app), enter their card and pin number (or security number for credit cards) and boom, they’ve paid. The entire demo took about thirty seconds.
A flowchart explaining how the payment process works. Click for the full-size version.
Of course, we’ll have to take the new solution for a spin ourselves to see if it’s really that simple. But it certainly looks promising, and the potential market is pretty enormous. China has a billion mobile phone users, and there are more than 1.3 billion UnionPay cardholders, according to UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu. As he put it: “Not everyone has a third-party payment solution, but everyone has a bank card.”
The companies hope that by 2013 the new service will have ten million users. Frankly, that seems conservative. UCWeb’s UC Browser is already China’s leading mobile browser, with hundreds of millions of users. And UnionPay really is ubiquitous in China; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Chinese debit or credit card that wasn’t UnionPay (not that I go around looking at other people’s credit cards…). If this system is as simple and as safe as it sounds, the potential number of users is astronomical.
We’ll be taking this new payment solution for a test drive in the coming days to see if it really lives up to the hype. But the idea of being able to buy things and pay bills with just a UnionPay card and a mobile phone — two things that most Chinese people already have — is pretty exciting for anyone who has struggled with third party apps and accounts and wondered: why can’t I just use the debit card in my wallet for this?
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