Xiaoqiong Hu from Alipay will be providing a keynote at Mobey Day Vienna on 4 December.
- What makes Alipay´s approach to customer engagement so unique?
Alipay is a multifunctional lifestyle app offering much more than a simple payment solution. We’ve developed dozens of features that make people’s everyday lives easier and more than 700 million active users already benefit from those. They can use Alipay to pay online and in stationary stores, manage their money, call a taxi, make appointments with a doctor or find the nearest retailer who accepts Alipay. Just to mention a few features. Alipay is a one-in-all app. And our users appreciate that.
Currently, we go a step further: Our Chinese customers want to use Alipay wherever they go, which is why, for example, we cooperate with many merchants and other partners in Europe. Thus, Chinese citizens can use the Alipay app on journeys for paying or other services, too. This results in a big plus in terms of convenience for our customers and an increase in turnover for retailers. And the potential is great, too: in 2017 alone, around 131 million Chinese took holidays abroad. To conclude: we are wherever our customers are and we want to offer a perfect all-round service – I’d say for us, these are the main factors benefiting customer loyalty.
- What are the values driving your everyday business and how are these transmitted to the customer?
Alipay stands for quality, innovation and safety. Every day, our 10,000 employees worldwide work meticulously to refine our products so that our customers get the best service possible. We also invest in new technologies such as AI, facial recognition, eye recognition, VR and AR to further enhance the user experience. In doing so we are aware of our responsibility towards our customers, our employees and society.
The security of our customers and their data has top priority for us, which is why we naturally work exclusively according to the highest IT security standards. We also work closely with regulators around the world to ensure compliance with data protection, information security, consumer protection and anti-money laundering regulations. In addition, Alipay is committed to act in a fully environmentally responsible manner in all relevant markets. We believe that this is the only way to ensure that consumers receive safe and reliable financial services in a sustainable manner.
- What have you done differently from traditional financial institutions?
We pursue a very clear path and an overriding goal: We want to offer our customers the best possible shopping experience. We started out as a pioneer and innovation leader in today’s ubiquitous mobile payment market and have established ourselves as a technology company in recent years. Today, we continue to proactively invest in cutting-edge technology to develop global technological solutions and implement them in cooperation with local partners around the world. More than half of all Chinese e-commerce payments are now made with Alipay. In addition, Alipay is active in 40 other countries and regions and currently supports 27 currencies.
As digitalization continues, people’s demands and requirements are increasing and they expect flexible, innovative solutions that are one hundred percent tailored to their needs. In the past, traditional financial institutions have certainly not always lived up to this demand. With Alipay, we are taking a multifunctional approach to make people’s lives easier in many ways.
