WeChat Pay now allows users to bind overseas credit cards

Tencent’s WeChat Pay, one of China’s major mobile payment services, announced today that international credit cards are now allowed on the mobile payment platform. Expats living in China and residents of Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan—places where WeChat is ambitiously expanding its user base—can now bind and activate WeChat Pay accounts with credit card services provided by MasterCard, Visa, and JCB.

It’s worth noting that this is the first time users are able to use WeChat Pay without having a Chinese bank account or credit card, according to a company statement from Tencent.

As China is going cashless, WeChat Pay and Alipay—a mobile payment service under Alibaba’s financial arm Ant Financial—have become ubiquitous and embedded in all kinds of daily consumption settings, such as online shopping, ride-hailing, ticket purchasing, bike renting, food delivery, and hotel booking.

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