As an important part of mobile Internet products, the technical development of mobile payment platforms has actually gone through a relatively long process. At present, there are about 270 companies with payment licenses in China, but only more than 10 of them have a large business volume, which can be roughly divided into two categories: 2C and 2B. The former, such as Alipay and Tenpay, are already familiar to many ordinary people. But there is also a type of 2B payment platform, which mainly serves some corporate institutions. Generally speaking, the overall system of 2B and 2C payment business is similar, but there are still big differences.
In a strict sense, the development of cross-border payment system should include three levels: first, the cross-border development of securities clearing and settlement system, such as the opening exploration of financial markets such as Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect, and Bond Connect, which are essentially inseparable from the international arrangement of securities clearing mechanism; second, the cross-border development of large-value payment clearing system, which used to be manifested in RMB clearing bank, agency bank model, or RMB NRA account, and now focuses on RMB Cross-Border Payment System (CIPS); third, the cross-border development of small-value retail payment.
Due to its close relationship with people’s daily life and the public’s great concern about the cross-border payment innovation of third-party payment, when people usually talk about cross-border payment, they usually refer to the small retail payment part. It is precisely because of the disadvantages of small cross-border payment business such as many links, long process, high cost, complicated procedures, low efficiency and low penetration rate that it is more likely to become the focus of new technology.
With the advancement of new payment technologies and the popularization of small cross-border payment business, cross-border payment also has new opportunities and challenges. In summary, the most prominent opportunities for cross-border retail payment at present are: with the cross-border flow of people such as studying abroad, tourism, and labor, the demand for small cross-border remittances has risen rapidly; the rapid development of cross-border e-commerce and the improvement of the two-way openness of “going out” and “bringing in” have led to a continuous increase in the demand for cross-border payment business; new technologies have improved the original efficiency and cost constraints of cross-border payments, and provided convenience for cross-border business.
At the same time, cross-border payments also face some outstanding challenges, including: transaction authenticity identification risks, money laundering and illegal capital flow risks, reserve fund management risks, evasion of personal foreign exchange settlement and sales restrictions, international balance of payments reporting management and monitoring risks, and how to effectively protect customer personal information security. In addition, the emergence of more cross-border payment tools will inevitably lead to the seizure of users and customer resources in the cross-border payment market. At present, this competitive situation has been fully demonstrated through the price war of the first bubble withdrawal rate. How to jump out of the low-level price competition and create a real service value chain is very important for financial institutions and payment companies. It should be said that online plus offline, platform model plus refined services are important parts that need to be improved in cross-border payment competition.