Alibaba and Tencent's digital wallets have over 1bn users each and account for half of in-store payments and nearly three-quarters of web sales in China
before Christmas, executives from OneConnect, a Chinese technology firm, boarded a plane to New York. They landed in a chilly atmosphere: American legislators were about to bar Huawei, a telecoms giant suspected of spying for Beijing, from supplying American agencies. But OneConnect did the job. On December 13th it listed on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $312m, which valued it at $3.7bn. Analysts expect the loss-making firm’s share price to climb by more than 70% in the next 12 months.
Governments are also exploring crypto-money. China is leading a solo effort. It has already filed more than 120 patent applications for a sovereign digital currency, more than any other country. Hawks fear it may impose its use oncountries. “Our values are at stake,” says Tim Morrison, a former adviser to President Trump. But China seems to favour goals closer to home.
A mightier threat comes from a state-led revamp of domestic payment systems. Eager to reassert control over key infrastructure, some 70 countries have rebuilt their local plumbing to enable near-instant bank transfers at the tap of a screen. Europe is the most advanced, having fused local networks into a bloc of 35 countries and more than 500m people. South-East Asia is also trying to stitch its systems together. On March 5th India and Singapore connected theirs for the first time.
Squeezed by low interest rates and the high fixed costs of going digital, banks across Asia are seeking to borrow scale by “moving to the cloud”. They store their data on large servers owned by specialist providers. Dave Bartoletti of Forrester, a research firm, sees the region as the “most important battleground” for cloud in finance . On hardware Alibaba is top dog. The firm provides a fifth of cloud infrastructure in Asia Pacific, more than its next two rivals combined.
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