Yiwu, a county-level city in Zhejiang province, is home to the world’s largest small-commodities market. On Monday, Yiwu Pay, a global payment platform, was launched to enhance the city’s market vitality and efficiency.
Yiwu Pay, the third-party payment company, will help facilitate cross-border payments for the city’s more than 900,000 businesses, according to Zhejiang China Commodities City Group Co, which developed the platform and owns the company. It will integrate some 2.1 million of China’s micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises into the global supply chain, connecting them with the global market through digital payment.
The platform will support a variety of payment apps and methods such as Apple Pay, Alipay, and UnionPay. Merchants can cash out in RMB instantly through the platform, which supports 16 major currencies for international payment and settlement. The platform has already partnered with over 400 banks and financial institutions in more than 100 countries and regions.
The platform is powered by a cutting-edge risk control system that enables real-time monitoring of the transaction process, ensuring secure transactions and payments for market entities. According to Zhang Wenjing, deputy general manager of the platform, providing digitally empowered payment services will help strengthen Yiwu’s status as the world’s capital of small commodities.
With the rapid expansion of customer-to-customer and business-to-customer cross-border e-commerce markets, traditional cross-border transfer platforms such as SWIFT are becoming increasingly slow and costly, said Zhang Gangfeng, an associate professor at Zhejiang University’s School of Management.
Zhang added that the launch of the platform will further unleash the market vitality of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises by cutting their transaction costs and improving payment efficiency. He said, “If Yiwu Pay can be applied to more scenarios and reach more diversified users and areas, such as China’s border markets with its neighbors, it will enjoy even more room for growth.”
Yiwu’s government data reveals that 176 countries and regions conducted cross-border renminbi settlements worth 56.54 billion yuan ($8.2 billion) with Yiwu in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 56.23 percent, according to Zhejiang Daily. As a growing number of Yiwu’s merchants turn to cross-border e-commerce, the efficiency of payments and settlement of transactions becomes increasingly important, said Zhu Yue, a vendor who has a store at the Yiwu International Trade Market.
Providing an alternative to traditional payment channels such as SWIFT and banks, Yiwu Pay aims to accelerate the growth of cross-border e-commerce. Its launch is a welcome development for merchants and investors looking to trade with China’s 2.1 million small and medium-sized businesses.
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