Kakao Pay and Alipay Decide to Combine Their Stores to Create Wallet-Less Society

Kakao Pay and Alipay have joined hands in order to create ‘wallet-less society’ that exceeds borders between countries. This project will move all of money and finance that are inside of wallets into mobile devices. They are going to combine platforms of Kakao Pay and Alipay in medium and long-term and are also going to think about going after foreign markets as well.

According to IT and financial industries on the 1st, Kakao Pay has decided to combine Alipay stores that are located in South Korea as Kakao Pay stores in fourth quarter of this year.

It is going to have Alipay and Kakao Pay available at a store by combining many Alipay stores in South Korea, which are visited by Chinese tourists, with Kakao Pay stores.

“First of all we are going to register Alipay stores that are scattered in South Korea as Kakao Pay stores and combine them.” said a high-ranking official for Kakao Pay. “This process will take place starting from third quarter of this year and we are going to have 16 million Kakao Pay users and 450 million Alipay users use payments through Kakao Pay in the future.”

When stores are combined, it will be possible for both South Koreans and Chinese to purchase products. There will be about 470 million users when users from both payment platforms are combined.

First of all, all of Kakao Taxis in South Korea will be linked to Kakao Pay in third quarter so that people can ride in Kakao Taxis without carrying wallets. Currently one out of four Smartphone holders in South Korea is using Kakao Taxi. About 4 people are using Kakao Taxis per second and there can be up to1.5 million calls for Kakao Taxis per day.

“If people were only able to call Kakao Taxis through Kakao platform, they will not have to carry their wallets starting from third quarter since they will be able to make payments through Kakao Pay.” said a representative for Kakao Pay.

Experts are predicting that frequency and amount of payments through Kakao Pay will increase exponentially by bringing markets for Kakao Taxi. Kakao Pay is also planning to link O2O-based Alipay platform with Kakao Taxi in the future and apply all of services that are operated under Kakao platform with Kakao Pay.

Kakao Pay’s goal is to minimize steps of making a payment just like Amazon and provide convenient way of making payments.

Currently 16.2 million people are using Kakao Pay and currently sales is $1.69 billion (1.90 trillion KRW). If Kakao Pay is applied as a payment method for Kakao Taxi and services under Kakao platform, it is likely that number of Kakao Pay users and sales will increase exponentially. Based on this, Kakao Pay is also planning to enter markets for offline payments in early 2018 in order to apply Kakao Pay to all of financial services in daily life. It has set up a strategy to enhance itself as a marketing platform business by linking simple wire transfers, certificates, and membership businesses.

Staff Reporter Gil, Jaeshik | [email protected]