Huawei Pay, Huawei’s own mobile payments service has signed up another client, China UnionPay (CUP).
Huawei Pay is the company’s response to the likes of Samsung’s Samsung Pay, Apple’s Apple Pay and Google’s Android Pay which currently dominate the market. Another mobile player, LG, is expected to enter the race with its own service, LG Pay, soon.
The service works on the company’s smartphones alone for supported services like cards from certain institutions.
With smartphone sales of over 100 million units globally last year, Huawei, currently the third biggest smartphone vendor in the world, has the reach to make its mobile payments service successful. How it will get that done is a wait and see situation since it is tricky as the slow rollout of current services like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay have shown. Like Apple and Samsung, Huawei will be starting with its own home market before taking its solution abroad. It will even have to best efforts by e-commerce giant Alibaba (AliPay) and Tencent (WeChat payment) which have already made significant inroads in China.
Huawei has been signing up partners to the mobile payments service which is yet to be launched or even officially introduced to the world, for a while now. Early this month, it managed to sign up Bank of China, a large state-run lending institution.
We had previously heard that Huawei would be joining hands with other Chinese mobile players (and its rivals) like ZTE and Xiaomi to launch a single service. Looks like that may not be happening.
It is still not clear when Huawei will make Huawei Pay official.
Source: AllChinaTech.com