Wechat Pay & Alipay

Hi, one of the biggest challenges of being in China is that if you do not have a Union Pay card then paying for stuff comes down to cash, Wechat Pay and Ali Pay are massive but you have to have a local account to add a payment card. It would be great to have a tie up with either or both that allowed our Revolut card to be added or have a pay feature inside the Revolut app.

Any traveller, expat or alike coming into Greater China would then not need to carry so much cash.

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Yes. this!!!
Totally agree - very frustrating for visitors

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@DavidRevolut would you be able to tell us if this is possible? I’d very much like the feature and I think it’s quite important for two reasons. Revolut future expansion into China isn’t going well without this as well as the idea is we can use Revolut everywhere :wink:

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I don’t know how I did, but my Revolut card (mastercard) was accepted by Wechat Pay!

Have you managed to pay at a merchant?

Yesterday i linked my Revolut card to AliPay but i still dont know is it working or not… :thinking:

I pay on AliExpress (via alipay) with a revolut virtual card all the time, no problems at all.

Since those services originated from China - aren’t you worried about data privacy and mass surveillance?

honestly I trust the Chinese government as much as the British one currently… a dedicated virtual card is all I need to keep extra peace of mind shopping there.

I don’t need to support shopping behavior tracking or a social credit ranking system by using those payment services.

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At least China is honest about what they are doing with the data, but honestly the culture is so different so you accept living there and what they do, or just choose to be in China. Personally I loved my 16 months there and now in Hong Kong I’m adapting to the vast difference in culture here from there. Wechat and Alipay is also getting traction in HK as well along with Samsung Pay, Google Pay, Apple Pay and Octopus so what are they doing with your spending data!

Not sure if using Google Pay, Apple Pay or any credit card or customer card really makes any difference. A profile of your behaviour is generated anyway.

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Not yet… Just opened the window to and asked to scan the merchant QR code to pay

and if you have to do a charge back it will work with virtual cards?

Generally speaking a virtual card behaves like a real card including refunds.

It works just like with the “normal” prepaid mastercard, but I actually rely on aliexpress escrow system instead of chargeback as my experience with :r: hasn’t been the best on that regard.

My payment on aliexpress was refused several times, can you hepl me, what can i do?

I’ve connected my card to wechat pay but no chance to top up balance on it. Recently I’ve tried to send money to my friend but card isn’t accepted for such transation. No idea if it works with merchant. I have Revolut Visa. Any idea if it’s possible at all to top up balance?

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I’m pretty sure only union pay cards are supported for this kind of thing

Would be great if @anon33247966 / @XaviRevolut could look into a partnership w/ UnionPay for Metal/Premium customers at least

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You might be able to use AliPay by now. They did announce plans to open it up to visitors by allowing the top up of a local, virtual card, via a foreign Debit/Credit card. Visiting China and paying like a local has generally been quite hard unless you qualify for a local bank account or have a helpful friend (I had a little help from the latter).

If they have finally got it working, be prepared to provide a selfie, a photo of your passport, a photo of you holding your passport… (I needed that just to get my old UK Mobike account to work there).

The good news is that more places take foreign credit cards than actually advertise (including American Express in some places). If you ask, “I can try it” is a common answer from those who speak a little English. And quite often it just works. Caveat YMMV.