WeChat + PayPal Partnership: China-maxxing's Latest Move

The Tencent–PayPal deal is about the new payment rail the Chinese central bank built

Every summer I fly back to China, and before the plane lands, I think about the same thing: will my Alipay work when I land in Hong Kong or Beijing, because my children will invariably need to a water or a pork bun.

So when I read that Tencent and PayPal announced this Tuesday that TenPay Global is now connected to PayPal World, my first instinct was: finally. In plain terms, a U.S. PayPal user landing in Beijing can open the PayPal app, point it at any WeChat Pay QR code at any merchant, and the transaction goes through. No WeChat download. No Chinese bank account. No mainland ID. The merchant does nothing different on their end.

This is big news because it’s not as if Tencent and Ant Group, which runs Alipay, haven’t tried to make it easier before. TenPay Global has existed for years as Tencent’s cross-border payments arm, a network of licensed financial institutions under Tencent that connects the WeChat ecosystem to overseas wallets and users. Until very recently, TenPay Global’s pa…