It is a lucrative market. Tourists from China like to spend more money on their shopping trip through Germany. On average, they pay 800 euros per purchase. The Berlin-based Solarisbank also wants to benefit from this. The institute has now entered into a cooperation with the Chinese payment provider Alipay, which claims to have more than one billion customers.
Behind Alipay is the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma
He has founded Alibaba, one of the largest online retailers in the world. His pay service is used by so many Chinese because they can order a taxi in their home country, pay for their subway ticket or pay their mobile phone bill. If they travel to Germany, they would like to pay here with Alipay instead of cash or a card. The Solarisbank should now help to make this possible.
This is a major order for the Berlin-based Fintech Bank, which has been handling payments in the background primarily for start-ups such as Smava or Autoscout24. For the time being, it will process Alipay payments only for traders in Germany – but in future the cooperation is to be extended to other European countries as well. “This cooperation has tremendous potential for everyone involved,” says Solaris Board Member Roland Folz.
German traders want to attract more Chinese
One of the reasons that Chinese customers receive such a special treatment at the cash desk is because they are especially keen to buy. The largest single payment that the financial services provider Wirecard has processed so far, for example, for Alipay, was 40,000 euros for an accessory.
Wirecard has been in business with the Chinese for a long time: the Dax group from Munich has been handling payments for Alipay for almost three years – for example, in 2,000 branches of the drugstore chain Rossmann, 160 in Munich Airport and in large department stores such as KaDeWe in Berlin. In Stuttgart, Wirecard has equitably equipped 50 dealers with Alipay at the initiative of the Standortförderung – the city is particularly popular with Chinese tourists due to its Mercedes-Benz Museum. German dealers use Alipay but also because they can thus benefit from the data collection of the Chinese: For example, Alipay recognizes that a user flies to Munich, the dealer at the airport get a hint – and can offer him alipay app now discounts.
With Solarisbank, Wirecard now has competition as a service provider in this market
The Berliners should apparently help the Chinese, with their payment system much faster to get into much more stores. The cooperation with Solarisbank “provides Alipay with the ideal technical and regulatory support for the further expansion of our dealer network,” says Xiaoquiong Hu, Alipay Manager for Germany, Austria and Switzerland.