Tapping into the Power of 2.8 Billion Mobile Wallets

Contributed by Bogdan Dinu , Chief Product Officer at Thunes 

WeChat is increasingly becoming an indispensable part of daily life in China. From text messaging to mobile payments, WeChat is the leading app in China and a vital way to connect families living overseas.

Digital evolution happens faster in China than anywhere else on the planet. WeChat, or Weixin as it's known in China (which means “small message” in Chinese), started out as a popular free messaging app just over a decade ago. Today, it has morphed into a super app that infuses almost every aspect of one’s daily online activity in China – banking, gaming, music, food delivery, ride-hailing, shopping, social media, and even booking a doctor’s appointment. Ten years ago, 99% of people in China used cash. Today, you simply can’t live without a digital wallet in this country if you want to transact in any way. 

It helps explain why Thunes’ recent big announcement – about launching payouts to WeChat’s 1.3 billion active users, coming hot on the heels of us joining forces with Visa, is so significant. This latest move means we now have 2.8 billion mobile wallets connected to our global network. Experts have predicted that more than half of the world’s population will use mobile wallets by 2025. Yet, with our total network connections now equivalent to nearly half the world’s population aged over 15, we believe adoption will happen faster than that. In Asia’s biggest markets, digital payments using mobile wallets already outpace credit cards. 

But numbers aside, no matter how many zeros are involved, they require some context. How will this impact Thunes and benefit our customers? 

Firstly, China is the world’s largest consumer economy, measured by purchasing power parity (PPP). It is also the world’s largest ecommerce market by far, with sales of US$1.3 trillion in 2020 projected to soar to almost US$2 trillion by 2025. China's cross-border e-commerce grew by 18.6% to reach 1.92 trillion yuan (US$290 billion) in 2021. This is why Thunes has been busy ramping up expansion in this market.

Quite simply, if you want to grow your business in China’s flourishing digital economy, you need to leverage mobile wallets, often the default payment method. Thunes’ collaboration with Weixin brings the ability to connect our global customers with a massive consumer base, enabling many more consumers and businesses to send funds to China and creating additional revenue opportunities. 

This partnership opens up a myriad of customer use cases. For example, a Chinese expat living in London can send money back to their parents in Shanghai or a Chinese construction engineer working on a contract in East Africa looking to send his salary to his family back home in Xi'an. Businesses benefit, too: firms in the US or Europe, for example, now have a simpler way to reimburse members of the creator economy to promote their brand in China, or pay to get their app built by freelance software developers in China’s burgeoning gig economy that will number 400 million workers by 2036. In each instance, the process becomes faster, seamless and more efficient than today’s alternatives.

Secondly, it makes receiving money globally easier and more affordable for WeChat users. Many of these people do not use banks but wallets, so this move ends their exclusion from the privileged ecosystem. Financial inclusion – providing people with access to safe, reliable and affordable ways to manage their money – matters enormously to us at Thunes. Our goal is to build a global payment ecosystem that enables anyone anywhere to make payments – or receive them – without hassle and stress, irrespective of location. And our partnership with WeChat gets us one step closer to this mission.  

At Thunes, we aim to simplify global payments, making it as easy as sending a WeChat message.