Tech Check: Beijing is Quickly Becoming a Cashless City

While your friends from out of town may be shocked by Beijing's opportunities to settle up via WeChat Pay, those visitors are sure to be floored by the local venues that don't take cash at all – a trend that's coming down the pipeline at breakneck speed.

Hell, even the lowliest filthy street cart accepts WeChat Pay, Alipay, and other forms of mobile money transfer these days, and by the end of 2017, you'll even be able to take the Beijing subway using a wave of your cell phone.

We know of one Beijing business that has done away with filthy lucre (at least the paper and metal kind) already: Jackie Chan's Cafe, housed in the movie theater that also bears the kung fu star's name in Wukesong.

Mobile pay devotees may deem such moves to be logical, considering how much easier it is to scan and transfer funds on your phone rather than hunt down an ATM or rifle through the crumpled bills in your pocket.

Meanwhile Samantha Kwok, founder of JingJobs.com, says when it comes to spending for her business, she has mostly swapped crumpled old bills for scanning QR codes. "I receive about 80 percent of my service fees, payments, accounts through WeChat pay. I've also completely gone cashless for any events we host – using Eventbank's online platform for prepayments or WeChat pay at the door."

She adds that WeChat Pay has also prompted her clients to pay in a timely fashion, because funds can be exchanged with a few  simple fingertip taps. Such conveniences have also extended into Kwok's personal life. "I personally haven't carried cash around daily for months. I tend to use WeChat pay more just because I'm already in the app talking to friends, clients and family, so it's naturally the first thing that's open on my phone. I also recently lost my bank card and managed to not have to immediately replace it, as I still had access to pay for most things through WeChat."

Meanwhile Mike Gagnon, a Canadian that runs Art&Animation Studio in Beijing, says he has "gone weeks without taking out my wallet" because of his preference for mobile pay. He adds: "It's just so convenient and don't need to worry about handling cash and  change. And with car service you don't even have to do anything – it autopays when the ride is done."

Those factors, along with ready access, have made mobile pay more and more ubiquitous in China, according to one recent report that said: "China has the largest proportion of people in the world using their mobile phones to make payments, online and physically." What's more: This article by 瑟尅SekkeiStudio details (in fun and lighthearted fashion) how, "China's netizens are in actual fact the world's biggest online spenders and constitute the world's largest mobile market, m-commerce market, and most active social media landscape."

Nichole Zuo, co-founder of the digital eco-system educational and media platform China Channel, calls such departures from physical bills a China wide phenomenon that is especially apparent in first tier cities like Beijing, before attributing the trend mostly to the growing availability and popularity of smartphones.

Zuo says clever marketing, such as the option to send Spring Festival fully digitized money in the form of red envelopes via WeChat to family and friends, made users all the more familiar and comfortable with this cutting-edge function. However, she says another big catalyst of such innovation is China's prior technological flaws, mainly: "the Chinese banking system is not as saturated, compared to western countries, meaning it was never as convenient to use a bank card here."

Matthew Brennan, China Channel's other co-founder, agrees that the convenience of scanning a QR code versus swiping a card for payment in China has driven mobile pay's dominance in the Mainland. "The credit and debit card systems aren't as developed here as in the States or Europe, so China has skipped that mostly. But it also has to do with habits – the technology is to use mobile pay is there in the West, but they haven't fallen into the habit. Whereas Chinese society has changed so much in the past 25 years, they have accepted those changes much more easily here."

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Photo: tmogroup.asia