Economic Observation Network Hu Qun/Wen "I still change to the original code, no charge." ”
On the morning of February 23, Li Dajie, a stall owner of the community vegetable express train, told the Economic Observation Network. The "code" in her mouth is the personal collection code hanging on the side of the stall, which has previously attracted the attention of small traders and hawkers because of a rumor that "from March 1, 2022, WeChat and Alipay collection codes cannot be used for business collection", and also attracted clarification from the central bank.
Sister Li is one of the many small traders, she said that after she saw the news, she thought that the personal collection code could no longer be used, and after the Spring Festival, she applied for an upgrade to a personal commercial code.
However, on February 22, the China Payment and Clearing Association issued an announcement on optimizing bar code payment services, ending the controversy caused by the policy. The announcement said that the current "personal collection code" is not closed, not stopped, and the function remains unchanged. At the same time, a new "personal operation collection code" has been set up, which users can freely choose to use. Users use the "personal operation collection code", the service is not reduced, the experience remains unchanged, the code assignment process is free, and can enjoy more efficient transaction reconciliation and other services.
On the same day, Alipay and WeChat also issued announcements that personal collection codes can continue to be used normally. This also makes Sister Li's mobile phone payment collection return to the way they were accustomed to before.
When told that the policy remained unchanged, she hesitantly said, "It's the same again? I'll see if the old code can still be used on March 1st. Although the current code can be paid by credit card, it seems that there will be a 0.6% fee, and the original code is good and there is no fee. ”
QR code payment has become the mainstream of offline mobile payment
On October 23, 2021, the Notice of Chinese Min min bank on strengthening the management of payment acceptance terminals and related businesses (Yinfa [2021] No. 259) stipulates the management of collection bar codes: For collection bar codes generated for payees such as individuals or special merchants, which are used by payers to read and initiate payment instructions, banks, payment institutions, Clearing institutions and other institutions that provide payment services related to collection barcodes for recipients (hereinafter collectively referred to as bar code payment and collection service institutions) shall formulate a classification management system for collection barcodes, effectively distinguishing the scenarios and uses of collection barcodes used by individuals and special merchants, and preventing collection barcodes from being leased, lent, sold, or used for illegal activities. For individuals with obvious characteristics of business activities, bar code payment and collection service institutions shall provide them with special merchant collection bar codes, and refer to the implementation of relevant management regulations of special merchants, and must not provide them with collection services related to business activities through personal collection bar codes.
Since the release of the notice, it has caused heated discussion in the market, with the implementation date approaching, the China Payment and Clearing Association issued an announcement on optimizing the bar code payment service, saying that the current "personal collection code" is not closed, not stopped, and the function remains unchanged.
In recent years, with the rise of electronic payment and digital payment, the third-party payment industry has become an indispensable infrastructure for the economy in the new era, and has sunk financial services to counties, towns and villages, deeply covering counties and rural areas, cutting from the daily life of the people, the distribution of agricultural products, etc., focusing on solving problems such as the "digital divide" and improving the level of mobile payment convenience and benefiting the people.
At present, the volume, business volume and payment amount of mobile payment users in mainland China have reached a new high. According to the "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet Network" released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in September 2021, the number of online payment users in the mainland reached 872 million, accounting for 86.3% of the total internet users.
With the effective control of the domestic epidemic, the payment industry, especially the offline acquiring market, has gradually come out of the impact of the epidemic and shown a good recovery trend, according to the report of the payment operation system released by the central bank, in the second quarter of 2021, the mobile payment business was 37.011 billion, with an amount of 117.13 trillion yuan, an increase of 22.79% and 10.32% respectively year-on-year.
Compared with the second quarter of 2021, the third quarter was affected by the epidemic and had a greater impact on the payment industry. In the third quarter, there were 39.077 billion mobile payment businesses, amounting to 126.81 trillion yuan, an increase of 13.28% and 8.62% respectively year-on-year.
According to the "China Third-Party Payment Mobile Payment Market Quarterly Monitoring Report Q3 2021" released by Analysys, the market transaction scale of third-party mobile payment, which is an important supplement to the mainland mobile payment business, was 77.46 trillion yuan in the third quarter of 2021, an increase of 2.55% from the previous quarter. Among them, the offline transaction scene of the third-party payment industry still maintains a stable growth trend, and the transaction scale of the entire offline scanning code market is 13.95 trillion yuan, an increase of 3.95% month-on-month.
In the offline scenario of mobile payment, QR code payment has become the absolute mainstream. According to the survey of China UnionPay's "2021 Mobile Payment Security Survey Report", the proportion of respondents using QR codes to pay continues to increase, and in 2021, it has increased by 11% compared with 2020, and has exceeded 90%. Mobile payment has basically covered the main consumption scenarios of people's lives. Among them, the more active are large and medium-sized physical merchants in shopping malls, convenience stores and catering; Public payment (utilities, network fees, etc.); small physical stores such as small vendors, vegetable farms, fruit shops, etc.; transportation travel (subways, buses, taxis, planes, trains, etc.); comprehensive e-commerce platforms, etc., the coverage rate of the surveyed population exceeded 60%.
"Since the third quarter of last year, the epidemic has been sporadically repeated in China, impacting offline consumption, mobile payment business has been greatly affected, and most of the merchants using personal collection codes are small and micro vendors, if the personal collection bar code is upgraded to a personal operation collection code, it is bound to increase a certain cost to this group." Xiao Sa, director of the Bank of China Law Research Association, said.
Some banks' abacuses are empty
From the promulgation of the Notice of Chinese Min min bank on strengthening the management of payment acceptance terminals and related businesses (Yinfa [2021] No. 259) to February 22, some banks have been working hard to lay out collection codes to small and micro merchants in order to compete for this market. The Economic Observation Network found that a number of bank staff told small and micro merchants that according to regulatory requirements, personal collection codes will be upgraded to commercial collection codes, handling fees of 6 ‰, the next day to the bank card, while the bank's collection code handling fee is only 2 ‰, there are various types of handling fee reduction activities.
A number of small and micro merchants told the Economic Observation Network that the bank's two-dimensional code has not yet begun to be used, and it can only be discarded.
"This is not at all to blame us for doing useless work in the past few months, and we are also laying out new business according to the policy." A staff member from a commercial bank in a city in Zhejiang told the Economic Observation Network that last week, there were also bank leaders who said that they should vigorously develop this business, so that they can carry out small and micro loans, wealth management and other businesses according to the bill flow data of merchants in the future.
Based on user payment data, and then mining and analysis of big data, to provide digital operations for small and medium-sized and micro merchants, banks can carry out ecological links and in-depth financial services according to scenario payment, such as loans, credit cards, wealth management and other services. However, it is clear that banks have not been able to seize this market for a day.
According to the survey of China UnionPay's "2021 Mobile Payment Security Survey And Research Report", "habits" have become the primary factors for respondents to choose mobile payment, and "convenience" and "preferential and promotional" have become the second and third factors for respondents to choose mobile payment.
For many years, Alipay and WeChat Pay have a long-term market share of more than 90% in mobile payment. According to the "China Third-Party Payment Mobile Payment Market Quarterly Monitoring Report Q3 2021" released by Analysys Analysis, the market share of Alipay and WeChat Pay is not disclosed, but the third largest market share of One Wallet is 1.19%, and e-Bao and Quick Money are basically tied for 5th, with a market share of about 0.51%.
In the third quarter of 2021, Alipay helped small and micro merchants reduce operating costs by further reducing the payment fees of small and micro merchants. Attach great importance to the elderly and visually impaired users, launch the "elderly model", launch the "uniform" password and other functions, and continue to improve the service capabilities of special groups such as elderly groups and visually impaired users. WeChat Pay benefited from Tencent's increased penetration in catering, retail and transportation industries, and the growth of Tencent Finance's personal transaction and consumer transaction scale was in line with expectations, focusing on maintaining healthy growth in the number of daily active users and payment frequency. At present, a number of bank Apps, UnionPay Cloud Flash Pay App and WeChat Pay, Alipay to achieve QR code interconnection, its market share is expected to be further consolidated.
"As the base of the industrial Internet, payment plays a role in data multiplication." The report of Analysys analysis shows that with the deepening of "interconnection" between Alipay and WeChat Pay, the value of industrial payment data elements is fully released, the role of data multiplication is brought into play, and the core competitiveness of industrial payment that adapts to the development of the industrial Internet era is created. Based on the industrial potential accumulated by mobile payment, it provides services such as "mobile payment + digital operation and management" to help small and medium-sized enterprises achieve digital reach to consumers.
Epidemic and offline consumption
The announcement issued by the China Payment and Clearing Association on optimizing bar code payment services has little impact on ordinary consumers. With the popularity of aggregate payment, one-code sweeping through Alipay, WeChat, cloud flash payment App, etc. has been realized, but it is especially important for offline small and medium-sized micro merchants.
Offline small and medium-sized micro merchants are more concentrated in industries with weak digital penetration, such as catering, retail and life services, and have been deeply affected by the epidemic in the past two years. Taking catering as an example, according to the statistics of a commercial information service platform, in 2021, a total of 1 million catering-related stores were cancelled, of which nearly 400,000 fast food restaurants were cancelled, nearly 100,000 hot pot restaurants were cancelled, and nearly 350,000 milk tea shops were written off.
"Since I came to Beijing in the summer of 2014 to open a beef soup shop, until 2020, there has been a certain surplus every year, but the epidemic has not only lost all the previous profits in the past two years, but also owed hundreds of thousands of loans to the bank." A person in charge of a restaurant from Huainan, Anhui Province, said that in 2020, due to rent and tax reductions, slightly profitable, in 2021, I heard that the interest rate of bank small and micro loans was low, so I borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-rent the storefront and renovate, but in 2021, the number of guests arriving at the store was significantly reduced, and the takeaway was not ideal, and now the transfer information has been hung up at the door of the store.
Source: National Statistical Office
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2021, the total retail sales of consumer goods 440823 billion yuan, an increase of 12.5% over the previous year, and an average growth rate of 3.9% in two years. Among them, the national online retail sales 130884 billion yuan, an increase of 14.1% over the previous year, higher than the growth rate of total retail sales of social consumer goods. In December 2012, food and beverage revenue increased by -2.2% year-on-year.
"We are pleased to see the Payment and Clearing Association optimize the bar code payment service, which to a certain extent actively responds to the national policy guidelines for supporting small and micro merchants and helps them quickly resume operations after the epidemic." Xiao Sa said.
Ordinary consumers use Alipay and WeChat Pay to pay merchants, but the collection codes of small and medium-sized micro merchants can collect money from a variety of payment Apps, which lies behind another type of payment institution.
In the current industrial payment market, there are two types of participants, one is Alipay, WeChat Pay as the representative of the payment institutions, they from the C-end to the B-end cross-border, with payment services as the entry point to empower the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises; one is the deep ploughing B-end payment institutions represented by the transfer card, Lakala, Baofu, they are based on the payment entrance and offline promotion capabilities, insight into the needs of small and medium-sized and micro merchants, offline small and medium-sized and micro merchants quickly promote from the front-end customer acquisition and transactions, to the back-end operation and management.
At present, B-end payment institutions focus on sub-sectors such as catering, retail, and life services, and these are the industries affected by the Notice of Chinese Bank on Strengthening the Management of Payment Acceptance Terminals and Related Businesses (Yinfa [2021] No. 259).
"(In the first half of 2021), the total payment transaction volume of the payment business performed strongly, exceeding RMB990.41 billion, an increase of 56.1% year-on-year, of which the total payment transaction volume of application-based payment services increased by 72.9% year-on-year, accounting for 61.8% from 55.8% in the same period last year. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the overall market penetration of offline aggregate payments, and the Company believes that there are still significant opportunities in expanding the scale of merchants. "Transfer card (9923. HK) 2021 interim report shows that in the first half of 2021, in terms of merchant ecology, the number of active payment service merchants increased by 30.6% year-on-year to nearly 6.13 million, and the number of QR code payment daily transactions peaked to nearly 42 million. In terms of consumer ecology, by focusing on offline payment scenarios based on small high-frequency scenarios, the number of consumers reached by mobile cards through the merchant ecology increased by 67.2% year-on-year to 822.4 million.
"From the perspective of comprehensive capabilities such as transaction scale and number of service merchants, the mobile card ranks No.1 in China's non-bank independent QR code payment service market." Analysys analysis data shows that in a single month of 2021, the peak number of Lacala daily records was 33 million, and the Number of Meituan was 20 million.